DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
DURHAM, N. C. 


Digitized by the Interne 


in 2022 with funding 
Duke University Libre 


https://archive.org/details/angelinfl 


The Methodist Pulpit 


The Angel in the Flame 


The Angel in the Flame 


Sermons Preached at Evanston, Ill. 
in the First Methodist Episcopal Church 


By 
CHARLES J. LITTLE, A.M. 


PRESIDENT OF GARRETT BiBLicaL INSTITUTE 


e 


138804 


CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND PYE 
NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 


Tee ig 
a ASD 4 ha AN 


uy, 
uy 
i 


rr. 
rr 


\ 

} 

ie iN 
COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY ws 
CHARLES j. LITTLE 


a 
A} as | 


4 Gawd. %, 
ae Sch. R, 
&r a y a 5 /\ me 
a Roary: 
j : 4 : 
CONTENTS ~ sl 
w 
CHAPTER Pace 
I. THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME, - = hag 
II. EASTER SUNDAY, - - - - 25 
Ill. Fairs, - - - - - - 40 
IV. HomsE, - - - - . - 60 
V. THE BONDAGE AND DELIVERANCE OF 
CREATION, - - - - Sane | 
VI. Stmon PETER AND JUDAS ISCARIOT, 92 
VII. THE Joy oF JEsus, - - - - III 


VIII. Tue Joy or JEsvs, - : - 129 


138804 


[. 
THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


“And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in 
a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he 
looked, and behold the bush burned with fire and 
the bush was not consumed. . . . God 
called to him out of the midst of the bush and 
said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I. 

Moreover he said I am the God of thy 
ies the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, 
and the God of Jacob.” —Ex. iii, 2, 4, 6. 


Every child that hears the story of Moses feels 
its charm. The mother’s anxiety and cunning are 
set off so sharply against the rush of the river that 
flows on heedless of the baby born to meet such 
danger and such destiny, the baby whose life is to 
be more fruitful to the world than the spring floods 
of the Nile have ever been to Egypt and the East. 
The eager sister choking back her fears and tears 
is blended so graciously by her passionate affection 
with the high-souled princess whose flash of impulse 

a 


8 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


to rear the little one becomes a royal purpose at 
Miriam’s passionate pleading. . 
Even a child feels the thrill of divinity that plays 
about these women’s hearts and learns easily the 
first great lesson in the chapter of God’s Providence; 
to wit, that wonders are wrought through hands 
that plait and cover baskets, through eyes that watch 
for the coming of help, through brains that think 
quickly the right thought, and tongues that speak 
bravely and promptly the right word. Children, 
though, are slower to learn that human lives are not 
shaped in a few minutes, like the toys made for you 
in the glass works while you look on; and slower 
still to learn that human lives are shaped from 
within as well as from without. Mother and sister, 
princess and priest, the traditions of Israel, the learn- 
ing of Egypt, the blaze of God in the burning bush 
might all be, and surely were, quite powerful in the 
making of Moses. But, after all, Moses, like every 
other whole number in God’s arithmetic, must work 
at his own destiny and help to shape his own soul. 
It is well to distinguish between the critical moments 
and the supremely decisive moments of a man’s life. 
The commonest human history may have many crit- 
ical moments, but the mightiest of human careers 
has but one supreme moment. As a rule, the critical 


THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 9 


moments in a great career lead up step by step to 
the decisive moment in which Divine and human 
meet, and in which the issues of life are determined. 
Now the vision that Moses saw on the edge of the 
desert was the supreme moment in his life, the de- 
cisive moment of his world-shaping career. It was 
to him what the vision on the plain of Damascus 
was to Saul of Tarsus, what his discoveries in the 
Psalms and in the Epistles of Paul were to Martin 
Luther, what the revelation of an approaching moral 
conflict in American history was to Abraham Lin- 
coln. As the soul bears itself in these supreme 
instants, so is the soul’s career and so is the human 
destiny in which the soul, confronted by the vision, 
is appointed and accredited to act as an agent of the 
living God. 

In discussing this supreme moment in the life of 
Moses, let me bring before you as vividly as I can— 

I. Moses as WE Must Conceive oF Him Be- 
FORE THE VISION. 

II. THE Vision ItsELF As A REVELATION OF JE- 
HOVAH’s LIFE AND LOVE, AND A PREPARATION FOR 
His Mission. 

I. Moses, so runs the earliest narrative, was 
keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the 
priest of Midian. From the speech of Stephen we 


10 Tur ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


learn that he was already in his eightieth year. 
From the Epistle to the Hebrews we learn that his 
deliberate choice to stand in with the God of his 
iathers and with the enslaved people of Israel was 
made when he came to years of discretion. From 
the speech of Stephen we learn that he supposed his 
brethren would have understood how that God by 
His hand would deliver them; but they understood 
not. And in the same speech we are told that he 
was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. 
The shepherd, therefore, who is leading his flock 
to the edge of the desert is not a stripling, not a 
stalwart lad full of wild enthusiasms, but a mature 
man of strange and sad experiences. He handles his 
shepherd’s crook as if it were a scepter, and moves 
before his flock with the bearing of a Pharaoh. His 
eyes as he scans the horizon are full of fire and 
strange yearning; his brow is lined with the marks 
of deep questions yet unanswered; his mouth is 
firm, yet his lips quiver and his nostrils dilate as 
though he were shaken with strange expectations, 
tantalizing him with their vagueness and their dis- 
tance. As he watches alternately the flocks of sheep 
behind him and the flakes of cloud above him, we 
see that we have before us one of those rare natures 
that stoop divinely to the lowest of tasks, yet are full 


THe ANGEL IN THE FLAME. II 


of “the thoughts that wander through eternity.” 
The shepherd thinker of the land of Midian, the son- 
in-law of priest Jethro and the son of Pharaoh’s 
daughter ;—we need no fancy to tell us that his 
thoughts are full of nightly conversations between 
him and the wise Jethro under the open sky. 

“My father, thou art thy people’s priest. Tell me 
what dost thou know of the Invisible? Hast thou 
any news? In Egypt there were many gods and 
ranks of gods; temples and ceremonies ; memorials 
and mummies; the streets were full of deities and 
sacred animals ; but I walked an.alien and a stranger 
among them all. Once only I paused and trembled, 
for beneath a veiled goddess I read the words, ‘I 
am what has been and what shall be hereafter, and 
no mortal hand can lift my veil.’ The words seemed 
to awaken in me the teaching of my mother and the 
traditions of the elders of my people. For they told 
of One who called our father Abraham and made 
the promise to him. Father Jethro! Thou too art 
descended from Abraham, for is not the tribe of 
Midian the offspring of Hagar’s son? ‘Tell me, are 
there among thy people no traditions of the older © 
time; is there nothing to tell me how I may find 
Him?” 


“My son, be comforted!” so I hear the priest of 


12 THe ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


Midian answer. “One story lingers among our peo- 
ple that may quiet thy troubled heart. When Hagar 
the mother of our race was put forth by Abraham, 
she cast her child Ishmael under the shrubs just as 
thou wert cast by thy mother among the reeds of 
the great river. And she cried, ‘Let me not see the 
death of my child.’ As she lifted up her voice and 
wept she heard one calling to her: “What aileth thee, 
Hagar? Fear not! Lift up the lad, for I will make 
of him a great nation.’ And as she opened her eyes 
she saw a well of water, and she knew that her child 
was saved. And here we are a great tribe according 
to the promise made to Hagar in the wilderness.” 

“O my father Jethro! If the God of Hagar 
and of Jacob would but appear to me! My 
father, the stars above us are but small points 
that glitter in the deep dark blue, and yet my 
heart is heavy with their magnitude, when trees and 
mountains and meadows and desert seem to dwindle 
away under the stretches of the sky. O my Father! 
if He, the Unnameable, the Invisible, would but bow 
these heavens and come down. I too have lifted 
* up my voice like Hagar. I have wept and I have 
shouted. But for my answer I have swallowed my 
own tears and the echoes of my own wild cry where- 
with I broke the long watches of the night. Father 


THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 13 


Jethro! The Unnameable has not heard me; or if 
He has heard, He will not answer me.” 

“My Son,” I hear the Wise One answer, “the 
jonging within thee so deep, so strong, is truly the 
voice of the Invisible. I can tell thee but little more. 
Our worship here is rude and mixed with habits 
borrowed from our neighbors even wilder than our- 
selves. But my Son, stay not to stretch out thy 
hand and continue the voice of the crying! Thou art 
chosen for a mighty destiny! Wait and watch and 
listen! The Mighty One will yet appear.” 

But another burden rested (so our records tell 
us) on the soul of Moses. He had expected to de- 
liver Israel, and Israel had rejected or refused to 
know him. Had he, after all, not mistaken his mis- 
sion? Might it not have been wiser to have ac- 
cepted the title, the son of Pharaoh’s daughter? 
Was not his choice, after all, the blunder of im- 
pulsive and unworldly youth, that fancies the straight 
line to be the shortest distance to a great purpose? 
What if he had not escaped from Egypt? What if, 
instead of the mad task of rescuing his own people, 
he had chosen to soften their lot and to blend all that 
was noble in their religious traditions with the teach- 
ing of the Egyptian priests, and thus had trans- 
formed and saved two nations instead of one? What 


14 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


thought more natural? But what thought could be 
more tormenting? No vision of God! No task 
accomplished! Great opportunities lost; nothing 
left of all he hoped for but a mighty hunger of the 
heart! Ay! that’s the thing! Blessed, indeed, is 
he that hath the mighty hunger of the heart! For 
him the burning bush shall blaze, for him the heav- 
ens shall bend and break with the visions of God! 
These are days, I know, in which it is hardly good 
form to be overmuch in earnest about Jehovah. 
Yonder lad talks jauntily about Him as I used to 
hear the youth of my time talk jauntily about the 
governor whose only function was to keep things 
going. We may grow wild about a new fashion in 
gowns, or in literature, about a new song or a new 
picture; we may have our enthusiasms for culture 
or for society, or for humanity; but to take God 
seriously? How vulgar! How absurd! 

Well! I am not talking to you, my flippant lad; 
or to you either, my flippant lassie. Nor am I talk- 
ing wholly to yonder eager youth with a great am- 
bition in his soul and hot hunger in his heart. No! I 
am talking to men like myself, to whom as age creeps 
on apace, and disappointments come in clusters, the 
question starts up sharp, imperative, insistent: Was 
the choice of my youth a wise one? Were the ideals 


THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 15 


of early manhood touched with real celestial fire? 
Were the promises that lured me forward the real- 
ities of the future, or only the shadows of a great 
desire? I am talking to women who staked their all 
upon the eternity of love and the coming of the 
visions of God, and now sit watching, though dis- 
appointed, clasping their dead hopes to their aching 
hearts and asking me with their hungry, silent eyes, 
Yes! Yes! I hear the promise of His coming; but 
where, where is He? For you I have a bit of glori- 
ous news. That hunger of the heart has been in all 
ages the herald of His coming. He has been found 
of them who seek Him, whose hearts are in a glow 
of longing for Him, through whose thoughts there 
thrill the currents of perpetual desire. 

“Why does the lightning strike the wires of the 
telegraph and telephone?” I asked the other day, and 
this was the answer: “If there is no electric current 
in the wire, the lightning will no# strike it. But 
when there is a current of low potential in the wire 
the lightning of high potential, of which the clouds 
and sky are full, seeks that of low potential, and 
therefore flows and flashes through the wire.” And 
so! I said, as I pondered a greater problem, so it 
must be with the eternal God, with the life of Al- 
mighty Power and Love. He leaps to the soul in 


16 THe ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


which there thrills and throbs a longing for Him. 
The glow of earnest thought, the current of eager 
expectation, the alternating rush of doubt and faith 
vibrating in mind and heart and soul make it possi- 
ble for God to blend our being with His own and to 
make us partakers of His nature. 

II. But the form in which Jehovah came to 
Moses is quite as significant as the moment of His 
appearance. The vision is a twofold revelation; it 
discloses a being, it imposes a task. It makes plain 
to Moses what Jehovah is; but it makes plain also 
what Jehovah expects and requires of him, and 
thereby fixes the limits of all appearances of God. 
For be assured it is no true vision of Him that leaves 
His image meaner than it was before, that calls you 
to empty praises and to empty dreams, and not to 
living duties and to lasting achievements, to efforts 
and to enterprises that tax your utmost energies, 
that strike their roots into eternity and bear immortal 
fruit. 

Now in this vision of God that came to Moses 
two things are specially noteworthy. First, the glory 
and beauty of the symbol; secondly, the personal 
relation established between Jehovah and his eager 
servant. Mark you, I am not now concerned with 
proving that the vision was real and true. I am tell- 


THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 17 


ing you just exactly what it was. In doing that, 
however, I expect to prove its reality and truth, just 
as if I handled sunbeams with a prism, I should 
show you something that no man had made. 

Take the symbol, first of all, old, familiar, worn- 
out almost with centuries of use. The bush that 
burns and is not consumed! Pause and remember 
that you are meeting this image of the eternal God 
for the first time in human literature. Our German 
ancestors had something like it in the tree Igdrasil, 
the Ash-tree of Existence, which had its‘roots deep 
down in the caverns of death, its trunk reaching up 
heaven-high, and its boughs spreading over the whole 
universe. At the foot of the tree sat the three fates— 
the Past, the Present, and the Future—watering its 
roots from the sacred well. But in the vision of 
Moses how clear and definite is the revelation of an 
only and a personal God! How clear, too, the an- 
ticipation of what is now the accepted truth of phys- 
ical science, that the energy of God, though always 
expended in nature and in history, is never con- 
sumed and never destroyed. Strange! When men 
read in Shakespeare the weird saying of Hamlet 
about the indestructibility of matter they break out 
in wonder and exclaim, How admirable a genius! 
How divine an intellect so to anticipate the pathway 

2 


18 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


of scientific discovery! But how pitiful the words of 
Hamlet are! Alexander returned to dust; the dust 
is earth; of the earth we make loam; and why of that 
loam, whereto he was converted might they not stop 
a beer-barrel ? 


“Tmperious Czesar dead and turned to clay, 
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away!” 


This is mean and sordid and depressing. But the 
vision of Moses, the symbol in which Jehovah re- 
vealed Himself through Moses to mankind, is sub- 
lime, uplifting, invigorating ; a symbol of unwasting 
power, a symbol of eternal consolation. Yet because 
we have been familiar with it from our childhood we 
seldom think of what it means; we do not see that it 
is the long-ago anticipation of the highest reach 
of modern thought, the flaming symbol of the inde- 
structible energy that bathes the stars and generates 
all forms of life. 

Did Moses recognize this range of meaning? 
Hardly. Great discoverers never know the fullness 
of their findings. Columbus, Newton, Galvani— 
how the modern world would daze them with sur- 
prise! Great prophets likewise never know the full- 
ness of their revelations ; scant indeed would be their 
interpretations of their dreams and visions. No 


THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 19 


Scripture is of private interpretation; God’s mes- 
sages belong to humanity, and it requires the whole 
mind of man to sound their depths. Jesus heard in 
the words of Jehovah that which escaped the ear: 
of Moses. “That is not there!” exclaimed a cele- 
brated German poet as he listened to a marvelous 
reading of one of his own poems. “That is not 
And so Moses might say to Jesus discover-. 


1 


there 
ing life and immortality in the words that he re- 
corded, For his mind was fixed upon a single point 
—the discovery of God. How he interpreted the 
bush to himself, I do not know. I doubt if he both- 
ered about the nature of the Voice that spoke to him, 
or bewildered himself with idle speculations. The 
bush blazed; the Voice called. It burned in his 
brain until from Pisgah’s top he fell into the arms 
of God, and heard again that same Voice calling, 
“Moses! Moses!’ And thus it remained for him 
the symbol of Jehovah’s living presence; the cre- 
dential of his mission; the confirmation of the cove- 
nant made with his ancestors; the assurance of his 
people’s deliverance and glorious destiny. Beyond 
this he did not go. For us, however, the symbol has 
a deeper meaning. Or rather it has been replaced 
by two greater ones, our modern conception of the 
ever-changing, never-diminished Energy of the uni- 


20 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


verse, and the revelation of an ever-dying, ever- 
living Christ. 

We have learned as the ancients hardly dreamed 
the unity and the indestructibility of the energy that 
sustains and maintains an ever-blazing world. What 
was burned upon the brain of Moses by a flash of 
Divine revelation is burned into our brains by daily 
applications of the same truth. The sunbeams break 
with it into our spectroscopes ; the wires quiver with 
it as they speed the news from shore to shore; our 
lamps shine with it, the air palpitates with this un- 
consumed, stupendous Power. In the whole wide 
world in Moses’ day was there only one bush ablaze 
with God? O! no. You must not read it wrong. 
There was doubtless many another bush. But there 
was only one Moses who had eyes to see and ears 
to hear. And so with this mighty and majestic 
symbol of God’s presence! Who pauses long enough 
to see? Who turns aside to listen? 

And then, again, this symbol seen by Moses has 
been replaced by the tree on which Christ died. For 
there He hangs the Lord of Life and Glory, a per- 
petual sacrifice, but a perpetual Power. For us He 
is always dying, yet for us He always lives. Men 
and women gather about this lifeless tree, this ever- 
dying Man, and in Him find the secrets of everlast- 


THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME, 21 


ing peace, of Divine comfort, of overmastering 
strength, of swift and certain resurrection. Still the 
mockers pass Him by and wag their heads and mut- 
ter: “How can He save others? He who could not 
save Himself!” But the little children praise Him, 
and the aged victor laying down his warfare turns 
to Him for his reward; and stalwart men beset with 
sharp temptations look to Him for strength, and lov- 
ing women seeking new beauty for their homes and 
for the world in which they live find Him the chief 
among ten thousand and the altogether lovely. In 
His name men and women rally to enterprises of 
lovingkindness; in His name ministries of mercy 
struggle with disease and misery. And where His 
voice is heard and understood the old earth smiles 
a sweeter welcome to the coming generations, and 
the old stars gleam with promises of immortality and 
glad reunion. Jesus the Life and Light of men! 
Eternally crucified! Eternally alive! 

But let us return to Moses and to his interpre- 
tation of the vision. What thrilled him, and what 
after all these centuries thrills us, is the personal cry, 
“Moses, Moses!” This offer of personal intimacy 
between God and man is the heart of Jewish and of 
Christian faith; the ringing, imperative, thrilling 
voice that cries, Abraham! Moses! Samuel! David! 


22 Tuer ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


Saul! The faith of the world has been kept alive 
by the men who have this vivid and unwavering 
sense of the Divine urgency. Not by the saints of 
the Bible only, or the saints of the calendar. There 
are others also, renowned and unrenowned—Ber- 
nard and Bunyan and Blandina and Florence Night- 
ingale and Luther and Pascal and Edwards and 
Wesley and Fliedner, and a glorious company whose 
names are known to the recording angel only. These 
have known that they believed in God and have 
looked for His appearing; but they have known a 
thing more glorious, that God believed in them, be- 
lieved in them in spite of defects and narrowness. 
The strength of such a vision lies just there; not 
merely in God’s appearing, but in His trusting one 
with a task, in His singling one out for some fine 
enterprise. We imagine that we must be always 
finding God; salvation comes with the discovery 
that God is seeking us. The majesty of Him, the 
vastness of His dominion, the sweep of His intelli- 
gence, the eternity of His being,—these are over- 
whelming. There is awful meaning in the words, 
No man can see My face and live. But when in 
some unexpected hour, after a fierce temptation or a 
bitter disappointment or a frustrated undertaking 
or a long and weary waiting the still small Voice 


THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 23 


calls one by name as He called Moses, and offers one 
an opportunity or illuminates a duty, then one knows 
that the Redeemer liveth. Then one knows that 
one’s way is not hid from the Lord in the multitude 
of His doings. 

Moses endured as seeing Him who is invisible. 
How splendid the paradox of the Seen-Unseen! 
Great indeed was the Divine demand; it staggered 
the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. But the vision that 
came along with it was proportioned to this demand. 
It merged the past and the future into one over- 
powering and commanding present urgency; and 
although the splendor was of Him that hid His face 
in mercy, it was for all that a strengthening splendor 
that made the beholder of it triumphant beyond all 
expectations. And when the vision faded (as all 
visions do) the Ever-living replenished the eyes of 
His Beloved with new fragments of His imperish- 
able beauty. Think you, my brothers and my sisters, 
think you that God is the God of the ancients only, 
that He has vanished from this later world? No! as 
the Lord Jehovah liveth, No! He is not the God of 
the dead, even though their names be Moses and 
Isaiah and Paul. Or think you that He has no vision 
or no task for you because your path is not the path 
of the mighty? Know you not that with God there 


24 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


is no great and no small; that it is better to sing the 
song of a little bird and to sing it aright, than to 
attempt the strain of a seraph and to sing it awry? 
Miracle of miracles! God is never far from any one 
of us. Here in this house of worship, out doors 
under the open sky; in the closet when you cry to 
Him in secret; at the fireside with the children; at 
the bedside when you wrestle with death for your 
beloved; in the rush of business and the cares of the 
world! Search the heavens for proof of His power, 
search the horizon for signs of His presence, search 
your soul for indications of His will, search your 
surroundings for opportunities to do the will of Him 
who placed you were you are! Rest not content 
until the bush shall burn for you and the stars echo 
with His voice calling you by name and sanctifying 
your intentions and your undertakings. Does He 
call Himself the God of your fathers? Then cherish 
the traditions that He sanctions and glorifies by call- 
ing Himself their God; and when He appears to you 
do bravely the thing that He commands. For the 
commands of God are opportunities ; and every noble 
task completed in His name hallows His name to 
His children, enlarges the soul of the doer, and in- 
creases the joy of the world. 


Il. 
EASTER SUNDAY. 


“Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not 
knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God. 
For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor 
are given in marriage, but are as the angels of 
God in heaven. But as touching the resurrection 
of the dead, have ye not read that which was 
spoken unto you by God, saying, Iam the God 
of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God 
of Jacob? God is not a God of the dead, but of 
the living.’—Matt. xxii, 29-31. 


1. “THE virtues of many,” says Pericles in the 
most beautiful of Greek orations, “ought not to be 
endangered by the management of any one person, 
to whose uncertain speech their renown may be in- 
trusted.” With such a feeling I approach the dis- 
cussion of the topic- which the Easter festival invites 
us to consider. The faith of many ought not to be 
endangered by my poor management; the hopes of 
many ought to have some solider support than my 
best reasoning and my purest diction. What pledge 

25 


26 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


can I give you that I will not put you off with glitter- 
ing phrases, with pictures plausible and vaguely beau- 
tiful, with deft appeals to your memories of sorrow, 
with arguments the strength of which I hardly dare 
to test? Do you remember Uhland’s beautiful poem 
of the traveler who crossed the river the waves of 
which murmured memories of other days? Do you 
remember the weird charm of the closing lines? 

“Take, O Boatman, thrice thy fee, 

Spirits twain have crossed with me!” 
Well! There’s my pledge! I stand not here alone. 
The shadows of those I have loved and seemed to 
lose surround me. Yesterday they emerged from the 
horizon, look where I might; they beckoned to me 
across the lake, and then melted into the distant sky 
like the clouds that formed and faded as I watched. 
My thoughts are neither deep nor wonderful ; I have 
no song to sing; no pinions to bear me into realms 
of poetic splendor; I have only the thoughts of a 
stricken man who knows the meaning of an empty 
chair and the darkness of grief. And yet I under- 
stand the words of Browning: 
“Never may I commence my song, 

Except with bent head and beseeching hand, 

That still despite the distance and the dark, 

What was again may be; some interchange 


Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought, 
Some benediction, anciently thy smile.” 


FASTER SUNDAY. 27 


For when one talks of immortality one is fain to 
hear the foot-falls of the invisible company, fain 


“To see the children sport upon the shore, 
And hear the mighty waters roliing evermore.” 


2. The Sadducees said there is no resurrection! 
It seems strange to us who crave immortal life that 
any one should try to prove a thing like that. Was 
it doubt or dread that made them wish for an un- 
broken and eternal sleep? Dread, I fancy, rather 
than doubt. And this dread was a thoroughly logical 
dread. Weare here. Some wind of fate or will of 
God has brought us hither. Why should not some 
wind of fate or will of God carry us elsewhither? 
And is the present life so great a boon that we should 
desire one hereafter? And are we sure that another 
existence would be a better one? Did you ever con- 
sider that old pre-Christian world long enough and 
carefully enough to understand this horror of the 
future? 

3. It does the flippant talker (whose name is 
legion) no injury to be reminded that he can not 
prove a negative. This life to any one that thinks 
seriously is an awful mystery; it may be only the 
beginning of a series. This Sadducean complacency 
of denial is as shallow as it is arrogant. It may be, 


28 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


after all, impossible to shuffle off this coil of con- 
scious being. Once alive (who knows?) we may be 
alive forever. We may be eternal prisoners in the 
scheme of things; the forces that created us may in- 
sist upon our stay. We may turn our telescopes to 
the star-lined avenues of space and murmur to our- 
selves, “What corridors and cells await us in this 
splendid dungeon? What possibilities of individual 
woe, what depths of social misery and varieties of 
pain?” 

4. The Oriental’s shudder at the thought of a 
future life came from his atheism, or from his de- 
graded conception of God. The Sadducean’s dread 
of it came from his utter worldliness. The Oriental 
had no knowledge, or a vague one, of the loving, 
eternal, and Almighty Father, and without this the 
prospect of eternal life has far more terror than en- 
chantment. The Sadducee had created for himself 
a screen to hide Jehovah from his eyes; he was 
wholly unwilling to shape his conduct by the severe 
standards that the thought of an eternity with God 
requires. It is just here that practical and theoret- 
ical atheism meet—in their shrinking away from im- 
mortality. 

5. It is curious, though, to note what capers the 
Sadducean skepticism cuts. “Master, Moses said.” 


EASTER SUNDAY. 29 


Moses! They hope to conquer by the name of one 
long dead; they give immortality to the will of a 
mortal who has dwindled into dust in order to 
strengthen their denial of immortality. The right 
to make a will,.said an old Roman lawyer, is the 
right to be immortal. And surely there is some- 
thing sublime even in this kind of future life. In 
a Moses who reappears wherever bondage reappears 
and who legislates whenever God incorporates His 
will in human statutes. Yet the Moses to whom 
these Sadducees appealed is Moses minimized. He 
is not the leader that talked face to face with God 
and proclaimed His eternity; but the practical legis- 
lator dealing with the drudgeries and more common- 
place relations of social order. And these arrogant 
worldlings who are ready to give an eternal efficacy 
to the transient edicts of the founder of their com- 
monwealth have no mind and no heart for the truths, 
especially the one supreme truth of Jehovah’s per- 
petual presence, which that commonwealth was es- 
tablished to reveal and to enthrone. 

6. “They have caught the Galilean now!” ex- 
claims the excited crowd. But how majestically the 
Galilean answers! No jest, no cunning, no stoop- 
ing to their lead; not even irony. “What do you 
snow of Moses?” is the calm reply. “What do you 


30 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


know of the record that he made?” Moses! Are 
you looking for him in the petty details of domestic 
legislation? Look for him at the burning bush, and 
hear him talk with God! And what do you know 
of God that you come thus with the trivial require- 
ments of your social order to bind them like fetters 
upon His almighty arms? First you dwarf Moses, 
and then you dwarf Jehovah; and having made them 
petty beings like yourselves, you summon them to 
tell us that there is no resurrection. 

7. The revelation to the Hebrews had a double 
character; it revealed Jehovah as the builder of a 
commonwealth in which all the nations of the earth 
were to be blessed; but it revealed Him as choosing 
and loving persons. How many He called as He 
called Abraham, I do not know. Abraham an- 
swered; so did Moses and John and Paul; so have 
men and women answered in different ages and in 
divers lands. I can not but think of God as search- 
ing everywhere for souls to comprehend and do His 
will. As fast as He discovers such willing agents 
He reveals to them all that the measure of their 
minds will contain. And this personal intimacy of 
God with His children is the chief end for which He 
controls the world. Our Heavenly Father is indeed 


EASTER SUNDAY. an 


the builder of commonwealths, but these are but the 
instruments of a larger purpose which is the salva- 
tion of His children. His commonwealths are tran- 
sient; His personal love is eternal. Israel, Assyria, 
Athens, Rome crumble to dust that enriches the 
world; but Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Paul, 
Jests—these abide forever. Nations in His hands 
are instruments of education ; it is not, however, the 
schoolhouse, it is the scholar that He loves; it is 
not the apparatus or the laboratory, but the learner 
that He holds in His eternal thought. 

8. The resurrection of the dead, so argues Jesus, 
was implicitly revealed in Jehovah’s first appearance 
to Moses. The new commonwealth was founded 
upon His personal affection for Abraham ; but it was 
founded not for Abraham or his posterity, but for 
humanity. And when the Father’s love for His 
human children could be effectually revealed in Jesus, 
the end of the Jewish commonwealth, then the com- 
monwealth itself had fulfilled its purpose and might 
be broken up. This implicit revelation was con- 
verted into plain and positive expression very slowly, 
because there were so few in Israel whose obedience 
lifted them to the plane of insight and of open vision. 
But the implicit truth lay open to be discovered, just 


32 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME, 


as the laws of motion were hidden in the movements 
of a chariot or a planet long before the days of 
Galileo and of Newton. 

9. The implicit reason for immortality, says 
Jesus, is not in man, but in God; only in the consti- 
tution of man so far. as that reflects the purpose of 
God—His divinity, His power, His unfailing love. 
Herein the revelation of God in the Bible differs 
from all other thought of Him. And because of this 
it still shapes and purifies the religion of the Western 
World. How shall we get the gods under? Such 
is the problem of Paganism, the paganism of an- 
tiquity, and the paganism that usurps the throne of 
Christ. How shall we coax, how shall we compel 
the gods to do our bidding? But the problem of 
true faith, whether of Abraham or Paul, of Bernard 
or Livingstone, is, What will God have me to do? 
And directly these souls appear, obedient to His call 
and eager to comprehend His purpose, He lifts them 
to a knowledge of that love from which neither life 
nor death can separate them. 

10. We are immortal, therefore, not because we 
wish it, but because God wills it. Our wishes are 
indeed intimations of His purpose growing stronger 
as our likeness to Him grows. Those whom God 
loves, live. They must. He can not forget them. 


EASTER SUNDAY. 33 


He can not and will not bury them out of His mind, 
and for Him to think of them with love is to per- 
petuate their being. Therefore it happens that those 
in whom this sense of God’s personal love is deepest 
and strongest expect most confidently to awake in 
His likeness, even though they worry but little about 
it. Their intercourse with God is so sweetened with 
humility that it is quite enough for them to be His 
children, and it is only when challenged that they 
proclaim themselves heirs also, heirs of God and 
joint-heirs with Jesus Christ. Only when buffeted 
and challenged do they care to assert that they who 
do the will of God abide forever. 

11. Our wishes are only intimations of His will. 
“Hold me tight, Docksie,” said the dying Scotch 
lassie to Dr. Maclure, “and Mither ll tak me oot 
of yourarms.” I will not urge the argument too far; 
but the absence of a revelation to the contrary gives 
to such hopes and expectations a solemn significance. 
“Tf it were not so I would have told you.” Has a 
joving God cheated the noblest of His children with 
the hope of immortality? ‘True, we may not say to 
Him, “Thou hast made me, now keep me alive and 
make me happy for ever and ever.” But He might 
say to us: “Children, cherish no delusions. Make 


the most of the life that now is; you will never see 
3 


34 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


another world.” He has not said it. And those 
who live as though He had, darken the face of the 
sky and deepen the sorrows of humanity; except in 
those regions (and there are such regions) where 
the belief in immortality has been degraded to a 


scourge. 
“Thou madest life of man and brute, 
Thou madest death, and lo! thy foot, 
Is on the skull which thou hast made. 


Thou wilt not leave us in the dust. 
Thou madest man, he knows not why; 
He thinks he was not made to die, 
And Thou hast made him ; Thou art just.” 
If (this is surely the meaning of Jesus), if there 
were no place for you among the mansions of My 
Father, He would have disclosed it more plainly and 
more distinctly than He has disclosed to you the 
movements of the stars. We have indeed no claim 
to another existence; but from a good God we may 
claim frank speech and simple truth. If this life 
ends all, why is it not marked as plainly upon our 
souls as it is upon our nerves and flesh and bones? 
Then we would shape our conduct to the actual con- 
ditions ; then knowing that the triumphs of love are 
brief and the joys of mortals but few, we would 
gather them quickly and swallow them eagerly. 
Then we would bury our dead out of sight—and out 
of mind. 


EASTER SUNDAY. 35 


But now! I look out upon the stars that watch 
me silently until their silence melts to music and the 
skies grow soft with sympathy as a Voice emerges 
from the immeasurable deep saying, “If it were not 
so I would have told you; do not sorrow as though 
you had no hope!” 

12. It is in this sense that I consider the consti- 
tution of the human mind, the mandates of the con- 
science, the expectations of imperishable love, an 
argument and a prophecy of immortality. I can not 
think of God permitting His obedient children to be 
cheated by implications that make rational life im- 
possible. For that is not a rational life over which 
hover delusions and false expectations. 

13. Some one, perhaps, suggests that illusions 
like these are necessary to the education of the race. 
Progress from partial error into more perfect truth, 
I grant you, is not cheating. We are not cheated 
when the movements of the planets at first conceal 
the truth that they subsequently reveal; seeing that 
the truth is always there for the patient discoverer. 
Nor are we cheated when our belief in the future 
takes forms that are diviner, sublimer than those 
our fathers cherished. This is indeed the education 
of humanity and the revelation of God. 

But that God constitutes man so that even in his 


36 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


ruin he searches for his Father’s face; that God en- 
tices him with outward displays of power and beauty, 
and urges him by inward impulses to search the dis- 
tant spaces and to detect the thoughts that shape the 
universe; that God crowns him with a conscience 
that commands him to die for truth and righteous- 
ness, and then lays him serenely away into everlast- 
ing nothingness—that seems to me a blasphemy. 

14. Nor can I understand those thinkers who 
in the vastness and wealth of nature find reasons for 
the littleness and insignificance of man. To me it 
is a fool’s objection that this planet is too small for 
God’s attention; as if the size of a globe fixed its 
place in the government of God or determined for 
Him the value of the beings for whom He shaped 
it toa home. In the presence of this vast display of 
life and force and form I take new heart and hope. 
What do I care for your objections based all of them 
upon your inability to think the problem out? The 
resurrection does not depend on your ingenuity and 
your power. Your incredulity is only the confession 
of your limitations. For in view of all these won- 
ders, why should it be thought incredible that Gop 
should raise the dead? 

15. Conscience bids me defy death and pain and 
poverty; it bids me defy the fashions of the world 


Easter SUNDAY. 37 


and shape my conduct to eternal standards. The 
Christian conscience bids me bear myself as a citizen 
of an immortal commonwealth, carrying with me a 
princely courage and a princely hope. This Chris- 
tian conscience has developed along with the belief 
in the living Christ who conquers death. It com- 
mands me for love of Him to wait and work for a 
vision that will come only after I am deaf to human 
praise and my eyes have crumbled to inorganic dust. 
It commands me for love of Him to die rather than 
to pollute my soul or to surrender my ideals of truth 
and righteousness. Even though this urging of His 
children to the obedience of the Cross implied no 
promise on the Father’s part, even though these chil- 
dren had a love so perfect that it cast out all expec- 
tation, so that they served without thought of re- 
ward, can we imagine a loving God decreeing their 
extinction in the moment that they most resembled 
Him? Is He so rich in those that freely do His will 
and so poor in dust and ashes, that He prefers to be 
God of the dead rather than the God of the living? 

16. I might stop here; you might go home re- 
joicing and repeating the words of Jesus as you go, 
“He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” 
For Jesus knew Him, and had a right to speak for 
- Him. But this is Easter Sunday, the day that marks 


38 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


God’s greatest condescension to His troubled and 
doubting children—the day that by its memories 
illuminates the mysteries by which we are enfolded. 
Jesus was not satisfied to proclaim the resurrection ; 
he enacted it. 

God who made our minds and shaped our con- 
sciences, who surrounded us with a framework of 
nature and of society so magnificent as to make it 
impossible for us after we had discovered Him to 
plan our lives upon a petty scale; God sent His Son 
to tell us what and who we may become—children 
of God perfected in His likeness. God who at 
sundry times and divers places has so controlled the 
common order of the world as to get very close to 
those who were seeking for Him; God who has often 
chosen willing souls for enterprises of loving kind- 
ness commensurate in their grandeur to the scale of 
His creation and supported them with His unfailing 
energy—is it so wonderful that this God should sur- 
prise all nations with the resurrection of His Son? 
Is not a supernatural event like this a natural thing 
for God? Surely there was no better way to beget 
us to a lively hope; and the reception of the procla- 
mation, ‘“The Lord is risen indeed,””—the recognition 
that because He lives we shall live also, reinstate us 
in our self-respect. For when we measure ourselves 


EASTER SUNDAY. 39 


against the universe and against the ages, we seem 
to be but specks and flashes upon the background of 
the immensities and eternities. But the revelation 
that we are objects of so vast a love lifts us to 


“An ampler ether, a diviner air, 
And fields invested with purpureal gleams.” 


Our conversation is in heaven. We are companions 
of Jesus Christ, who rose from the grave not merely 
to be a splendid shadow flitting across a distant cen- 
tury, but a living Presence above us and within us. 
Above us as He lived for Stephen; within us as He 
lived in Paul; above and about us as He lived to 
John, the New Jerusalem building itself before him, 
as his soul expanded to the image of his risen Lord. 

Sing your Easter anthems then; rejoice, again, 
I say rejoice. But remember that you must rise with 
Christ ; not in the great day of His appearing only, 
but here and now, that you may learn to look, as He 
did, at the unseen things, the things that are eternal, 
the chief of which is the God of the living who raised 
Jesus from the dead. 


III. 
FAITH. 


“Now faith ts the substance of things hoped for, the 
evidence of things not seen.”—Heb. xi, TI. 


FaitH as a basis of human activity is like land 
redeemed from the sea; the winds and the waves 
begrudge the invader his home and assail it with a 
spiteful constancy. The dikes he builds will not 
watch and mend themselves; and if he is not eter- 
nally vigilant the savings of a lifetime may be swal- 
lowed up by the inpourings of a night. But as we 
fight for everything worth having, why should we 
not fight for our faith? May not the fierceness of 
the battle be a warrant for the value of the prize? 
May not the energy developed in the struggle be 
an ample reward for its anxieties and its hardships? 
At any rate the faith described in the text and illus- 
trated in the splendid pictures that follow was just 
such a hard-won basis of human activity. The men 
and women depicted by the writer were not having 
a holiday; the scenes in which they appear are not 

4o 


FaIrH. 41 


the scenes of a comedy ; the sounds that reach us are 
not the sounds of music and dancing. Here is life 
grim and desperate; action energetic, difficult, he- 
roic; here is conflict, endurance, tribulation, triumph, 
defeat, death! 

And why should we inheritors of their conflicts 
be wishing for an easy time? For a God so mani- 
fest that there can be no trial of our faith? For a 
God so present to our senses and so lavish of victory 
that our souls might fall into decay or disorder for 
want of use or be puffed into arrogance by prosper- 
ity? These words of the text mean just what they 
say. The real world is the invisible world; the fu- 
ture is more than the present. There is evidence and 
substance for both; but the evidence of the Unseen, 
the substance of the future, is within us. It is our 
faith; not fancy, or conjecture, or credulity; not 
vision nor knowledge, but FAITH. 

Now the text is not a definition. It con- 
tains, rather, two important propositions about 
faith, with which the writer presumes his read- 
ers to be as familiar as they are with seeing or 
thinking. Like him I am not going to define 
Faith. I shall begin by pointing out what you 
all know, that faith is of two kinds: faith in prin- 
ciples, and faith in persons. You may believe in 


42 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


science or in Galileo, in righteousness or in your 
father, in the progress of humanity or in your friend. 
In like manner you can believe in the omnipotence 
of love or in the living God, in the doctrines of the 
Sermon on the Mount or in Jesus Christ, the Savior 
of men. Faith is of one or the other kind. And 
you know just how such faith possesses your soul, 
just how it abides within you as the basis of activity. 
The object of your faith never vanishes, the image of 
it lives within you and certifies to you its reality and 
value. Thus the image of mother or wife or friend 
abides with us, once they conquer and command our 
confidence. The image forms itself, perhaps, quite 
slowly ; at first dim, obscure, wavering, and not al- 
ways attractive; then definite, vivid, charming, sub- 
jugating; at first demanding evidence, then when 
made perfect transcending proof, soaring into the 
region of certainty, defying doubt, and triumphantly 
dispensing with all need of argument. “Faithful 
among the faithless he’’ is one of those phrases in 
which poetry is wiser than philosophy. For by it 
Milton makes plain to us in a flash the real nature of 
faith; it is not the angelic intelligence that gazes 
unabashed into the face of God. Lucifer had that; 
yet he saw the face in vain. It is rather fidelity to 
the vision granted us, be it glorious or dim, be it a 


FalIrTH. 43 


throne surrounded with clouds or with angels, be it 
a bush flaming in the desert, a Christ crowned with 
thorns, or a Christ risen from the sepulcher. For do 
we not praise the fidelity that stands firm, not because 
of evidence, but in spite of it? “She believed in me,” 
you hear some triumphant struggler say of his wife 
or his daughter, “when others thought me mad.” 
“He never doubted me for an instant, and yet all ap- 
pearances were against me!” With words like these 
we praise the steadfast friend! 

And as it is with persons, so it is with principles. 
You are seized with what seems to be an imperative 
truth; a peremptory voice within you calls upon you 
to establish, to declare, to defend it. At first it 
haunted you merely. It came in dreams, in frag- 
ments, in glimpses, at odd moments, in the intervals 
between your daily actions, or between your portions 
of sleep. Doubts gathered about it and beclouded 
the heavenly vision. You reflected upon it, but 
thinking bewildered you; and you tried to drive it 
away again. It would not down at your bidding. 
Then you sought to make it clear, distinct, vivid, to 
free it from obscurity and uncertainty; you gave 
your mind and your whole soul to it. Until 
finally the idea became a reality overpowering you 
with its enchantment; transfiguring the world for 


44 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME, 


you; illuminating your future and expanding your 
life, giving new meaning to your activities and a key 
to your existence. You were for the first time at 
home in the world, and the sky above your head no 
jonger seemed remote and empty. Your whole being 
swallowed in your discovery, yourself abandoned to 
a divine idea you had lost your life and found it 
again. Furthermore the larger and nobler this idea 
in which you lose your soul, the larger and nobler 
the soul that you receive for your surrender. 

Let me now try to make my meaning plainer to 
you by a few examples. First of all, we will explore 
the region of principles to see whether these propo- 
sitions hold there. Take, for instance, the principle 
that underlies all our science that makes any science 
possible. ‘What!’ exclaims some scoffer, “surely 
science has naught to do with faith; science with its 
uncompromising logic, science with its sharp scrutiny 
of evidence, science with its cautious temper, science 
with its searching and relentless tests.” Yes! my 
loquacious friend, when you have thought more you 
will talk less and not so loud! Science is impossible 
without faith. We must yield ourselves to an un- 
demonstrable principle in order to have science at 
all. And here it is. The universe is comprehensible ° 
by the human mind. Nature is here to be under- 


FaITH. 45 


stood, and our nunds are here to understand nature. 
This is only saying that knowledge is a reality and 
not a delusion, only saying that science is something 
more than a kaleidoscope, in which some bits of in- 
formation can be shifted into forms of apparent 
symmetry. To say that knowledge is possible, is to 
proclaim a belief in the fitness of the mind to dis- 
cover the mysteries which in these latter days it at- 
tacks so intrepidly. Now are you really shallow enough 
to think that you could PRovE this fitness of the mind 
to discover the secrets of nature? Are you so absurd 
as not to see that to prove any such correspondence 
of the human mind to the universe would require our 
science to be already completed? Whereas, our sci- 
ence has just begun. For anything that you can tell 
human intelligence is already dazzled and dazed with 
excess of light, the human brain is beginning to crack 
under the pressure of its knowledge, and the next 
stage will be delirium and not science. Bah! says 
the man of faith. Leave such chatter for babies and 
for cowards. Believe in Human Intelligence! Be- 
lieve, too, that this glorious frame was made for us 
to explore and to comprehend! Nature has no secrets 
for skeptics and skulkers; she keeps them for her 
indefatigable believers. Why, some years ago when 
a German physiologist declared bluntly that he pur- 


at, 4 Naf Val (™ e 4 


46 ' Tur ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


sued science simply to make a comfortable living, his 
frankness provoked disgust. “How many Newtons 
and Harveys and Faradays are we going to have in 
the future,” men exlaimed indignantly, “if the faith 
in nature’s comprehensibility, if the faith in human 
intelligence breaks down and the sciences are de- 
graded to the level of the cow in the stable that we 
keep for the sake of butter and of cheese?” 
“Melloni,” who discovered the secrets of light 
and heat, “Melloni,” said Professor Langley, “was 
born to science as some men are born to poetry.” 
When a boy at Parma, a Voice came to him as it 
came to the child Samuel. And he would steal forth 
before the dawn to climb a hill, from the summit of 
which he could hold communion with the rising sun! 
Watch him as his eyes dilate and thrill responsive 
to the sunshine streaming from the distant orb! O! 
but that is only a peculiar tremor of his nerves, some 
eccentricity of nervous organization, some peculiar 
convolution of the brain, or some idiosyncrasy of 
the living tissue not very far, perhaps, from the limits 
of disease! Go to, thou chatterer! It is an instance 
of the faith in which science lives and moves and has 
its being, faith in the truth that hovers near the seek- 
ing soul accepting its Divine vocation; the faith of 
Copernicus and Kepler that God waits patiently for 


FaItH. 47 


discoverers; that when they come hunting for His 
hidden secrets He smiles upon them and guides them 
by the shinings of His face. 

The skepticism that attacks the truths of morality 
and religion can not logically spare our science. For 
to the consistent skeptic there is no science nor possi- 
bility thereof. To him there is neither sure intelli- 
gence nor certain truth; to him there are only shad- 
ows of a perplexing Unknowable; shadows, frag- 
mentary, tantalizing, deceptive. Hunger and thirst 
are the sure realities ; let us eat, drink, and be merry, 
for to-morrow we die. 

Science depends upon the succession of believers 
who have in their faith the evidence of invisible 
realities, who carry into their investigations the sub- 
stance of that hope which has enabled science to live 
on from age to age in spite of suspicion and con- 
tumely and persecution and black ingratitude. And 
since this applies to those departments of human dis- 
covery where experiment and observation are always 
possible, the sciences that we call exact, much more 
does it apply to those departments like Ethics and 
Sociology, where proof by experiment is out of the 
question. Or to put the same thought in the form 
of a question, “What is to become of our expecta- 
tions for humanity and of our hopes of discovering 


48 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


the laws and conditions of human progress, if we 
lose faith in their existence?” “Things look bad, I 


’ 


know,” exclaims some one jauntily. “It is a long 
way from an oyster to a Plato, but it has been trayv- 
eled!” Yes, it has been traveled once! It is a long 
way from an oyster to a drunken woman in the gut- 
ter, and that distance has been traveled often. What 
shall we do with our hopes in the face of depressing 
facts such as ignorance and drunkenness and brute 
violence; the tendencies to rebarbarization and an- 
archy among the poor, the cowardice of the respect- 
able, the wantonness and cruelty among the rich? 
Are we, with our ideals of a divine-human society, 
rainbow-chasers? Shall we give up hopes of a better 
society because of disagreeable experiences and nasty 
exhibitions of human meanness? Or shall we derive 
the substance of a better world from the energy of a 
defiant faith? Shall we attack the social problems 
of our epoch with the cry of Jacob on our lips, 
“Wrestling I will not let thee go?” Or shall we su- 
finely abandon effort and abandon hope, having no 
touch of God to keep our souls alive? 

Art thou fain to help thy brother man? Accord- 
ing to thy faith shall it be unto thee. It may be, and 
indeed it is, wisest to assume that in this wrestle 
with the social problem you will be crippled and go 


FAITH. 49 


halting upon your thigh in later days. Well! Be 
a cripple and become a prince; wrestle with him, and 
win from God some whisper of His present name! 
Confront the problems of your time with faith. Rec- 
ognize their magnitude and their difficulty. For only 
by stating these problems correctly can they be pre- 
pared for solution. But be not dismayed. If the 
vision tarry, wait for it! It will surely come. No- 
where in the whole range of inquiry is it so true as 
in our social science: “He whose soul is lifted up 
within him shall not walk straight, but the just shall 
live by His faith.” 

Here, then, are two principles which are the vital 
breath of science—the comprehensibility of nature, 
which is the life of physical and biological inquiry ; 
and the perfectibility of humanity when obedient to 
discoverable laws of progress, which is the life of 
sociological investigation. 

Let us turn now from belief in principles to faith 
in persons; there, too, we shall, I think, find reason 
for these propositions. Consider first our belief in 
ourselves, in our unity, and in our freedom. Who 
aml? Whenceaml? WhatamI? I might believe 
myself a crest of foam on the billows of an ocean 
forever changing, a brief melody starting from eter- 
nal silence and swiftly returning thither, an arrow 

4 


50 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


shot into the air, a cloud fading into the sky. But 
I will not! No, as Jehovah liveth, I will not! I was 
only a point in the beginning, but now the circle of 
my thought sweeps outward till it touches God. My 
conscience tells me that I have power over myself, 
over my fate, over my future. It chides me for my 
weakness, reminds me of my self-sovereignty, chal- 
lenges me to dare and to do. And in this conscience, 
in this reiteration of my control of my fate lies for 
me the promise of the future. My consciousness 
grows rich and joyful, breaking over the bounds of 
to-day and conceiving itself an indestructible will- 
power. “O! but you can not prove that you are 
free,” the skeptic scoffs. That energy of will that 
asserts itself in moments of temptaton, that con- 
science that saves you from the clutch of sin, they 
may be chimeras after all. You can not prove that 
you are free! Well, suppose I can not! I can not 
prove that I am alive to a corpse. If you have no 
sense of freedom, I can not prove my freedom to 
you, but I am sure of it to myself. All the objections 
I have ever confronted have only irritated and re- 
pelled me, only stirred my soul into rebellion, or 
eclipsed me with moral bewilderment and fear. To 
any kind of life that seems to me worth living, the 
belief in my own freedom, in a certain limited power 


FaItH. 51 


over my own character and conduct is absolutely nec- 
essary. I can no more live without this belief than I 
can breathe without oxygen. This faith of mine, in- 
vincible to all opposition, this basis of my life is to 
me the evidence of that which by its very nature 
must remain unseen. My conscience rising supreme 
and sublime in the hour of fierce temptation, with its 
imperative “I will” and “I will not,” must be the 
warrant of its own integrity, of its own autonomy, 
its own Divine illumination. 

One glides easily from such thoughts as the des- 
tiny of humanity and the integrity of conscience to 
the thought of man’s destiny and integrity beyond 
the grave. For let a man hold fast to his conscience 
in this life, let him by God’s grace become worthy of 
immortality, and the proof of it is not far to seek, 
for it lies in his own soul. This is what Jesus meant 
when He said it is eternal life to know Thee, the only 
true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. 
This is what John meant when he wrote, “He that 
doeth the will of God abideth forever.” In other 
words, the pledge and surety of immortal life is not 
to be found in cunning arguments about the nature 
of the soul, but in the sense of powers unemployed, 
of ideals unfulfilled, of possibilities struggled after 
but unachieved. The proof is to be found in the 


52 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


feeling of contact with the personal God, the eternal 
Father of our souls, who will not suffer us to be 
plucked from His hands, in the conviction that we 
are of the same essence with God, partakers of the 
Divine nature, rejoicing in the Divine will, and 
gladly co-operating with the Divine purpose. Pos- 
sessed with such desires and conviction, seized of | 
the Eternal Spirit, the soul exclaims exultantly: 
Why should I die? Am I not just emerging from a 
life of weakness and ignorance and selfishness and 
wrong-doing? Why should I die; have I not just 
discovered the secret of real being, the mysterious 
joy of existence? Why should I die when I am come 
to do Thy will, O God? Are not Thy mansions 
many? Are not Thy habitations eternal? Are not 
Thy plans manifold and far-reaching? Surely some- 
where amid Thy mighty undertakings Thou canst 
find a work for me! Once I was, indeed, a rebellious 
striker against Thy will, but now I have discovered 
Thee, now I am growing like Thee. Now I feel the 
stirrings of eternity within me. Thou art the God 
of the living, and in finding Thee I first learned that 
T was indeed alive. 

I know that this is a reversing of the common 
teaching, to tell you to be sure of the worth of your 
own soul first, and then to search in it for the evi- 


Falta. 53 


dence of immortality. But I would rather think with 
Paul and John and Jesus than with the common man. 
Do not ask proof of your immortality; be good and 
true, and you shall find it. God is our life and our 
light! If our little planet broke loose from the sun 
it would wither and perish; we are safe enough so 
jong as our lives are hid with Christ in God. 

Some Romans tried to persuade the world that 
Julius Cesar had risen from the dead; at least that 
he had become a God. But the thing was too pre- 
posterous. Few were credulous enough to swallow 
that. Not so however with Jesus Christ. It seems 
in His case so natural that God should not suffer 
Him to see corruption. Death could not hold Him! 
It might bruise Him, but it could not lay Him low. 
And in the same way the life that is in us is the 
guarantee of its own persistence. The love that will 
not perish, the love that cherishes the recollections 
of the departed so that they become at last more real 
than the voices and faces of those near us in the flesh, 
this is the earnest and pledge of our reunion. I am 
persuaded, wrote St. Paul, that neither principalities 
nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, 
nor height, nor depth, nor life, nor death, nor any 
other creature can separate us from—what? Why, 
from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. Love, 


54 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


then, if you would live. Let the parent cling to the 
child; let the child cling to the parent; let the affec- 
tion be too strong for death to shatter. Let your 
friendships be worthy of immortality, seek those who 
shall be worth knowing always, men who ‘grow 
larger as they grow older, women that become di- 
viner as their earthly beauty fades away. Embrace 
the figure and the soul of Jesus, your Savior, with 
the faith that works by love, and laugh the skeptic 
to silence with your exultant cry: “Believe what you 
choose about your own soul, but mine is too full of 
love and of love-life to be obliterated by a short 
journey to another world.” 

Or consider next the personality of others. How 
strange, how awful is our separation from each 
other! Each soul is hermetically sealed ; we can not 
creep into each other’s consciousness. So that in 
moments of doubt and distrust we can not get at the 
reality; suspicion darkens and ruins the peace of 
friends and the happiness of love. Who has not 
some time in his life beaten helplessly against these 
separating walls? To live together happily we must 
trust each other, believe in a love that is invisible and 
that shows itself in tokens only. We may stain these 
tokens with jealousy and doubt, and shut ourselves 


FaitH. 55 


away from our beloved ; we may refuse to believe in 
teachers, in rulers, in prophets, in redeemers until life 
becomes a torment and a tragedy. For it is a mad- 
ness to demand of each other the impossible, the 
turning inside out the lining of our souls for thor- 
ough scrutiny. What a picture is that of Jane Car- 
lyle reading letters as beautiful as ever touched a 
woman’s heart, and protesting that Carlyle wrote 
them to adorn his future biography! What a picture 
is that of the man and woman in the Norwegian 
drama writhing helpless in the coils of a distrust that 
murders love and life! For once the soul is aban- 
doned to unbelief, all evidence is vain. What can 
take the place of faith when faith departs? To be 
distrusted ; how helpless one becomes! How tor- 
menting the impossible wish to make bare one’s soul, 
to prove one’s fidelity by some miracle of inward 
revelation. 

But did it ever occur to you that this difficulty 
of getting into the other’s soul is the origin of the 
preposterous demands we often make of God? We 
assure Him, like the French poet, that we will believe 
in Him if He will turn His infinite being inside out 
for our inspection, if He will become a King of 
Lilliput, that we may hold Him in our right hand 


56 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


and examine Him at our leisure! Do you think my 
words extravagant? Let me quote the lines of 
Musset to which I have referred: 


“Tf suffering and prayer 
Can not reach Thy Majesty, 
Keep for Thyself Thy solitary grandeur, 
But close forever yonder immensity. 
If our mortal anguish though 
Can climb to Thee 
If in Thine eternal dwelling-place 
Our groans are heard, 
Then break the deep blue vault 
That covers creation. 
Lift the curtains of the world 
And show Thyself, God, just and good! 
Then on the broad earth 
Thou shalt find eager faith and love. 
Humanity entire and everywhere 
Will fall at Thy feet with joy.” 


There you have it. Is it not preposterous? Infinite, 
become Thou finite! Immaterial, become Thou ma- 
terial! Creator, turn Thy creation inside out and 
show Thyself to mortal eyes; then Thou shalt have 
our worship and our love! Alas! What fools we 
are! Is it not enough that He is there, and that 
every leaf and every breeze and every sunbeam bears 
witness of His presence? Enough that He speaks to 
us from burning bush and celestial constellation, 
from the face of martyr and from the mouth of 


FaIrvH. 57 


prophet and from the song of poet and the deeds of 
saint? Enough that His still small voice makes itself 
heard distinct and clear in the moment of trial, in 
the sharpness of temptation, in the rapture of moral 
victory and spiritual progress, in the aspirations of 
the ages and the march of history? So, too, with 
Jesus Christ our Lord. How absurd the discussions 
about Him among those who have never given the 
Gospel narratives a chance to make their own im- 
pression! How absurd the discussion of Him among 
those to whom any religion is at best a psychological 
phenomenon or a bit of history! Would you care for 
the opinion of those who had never heard the music 
of Beethoven or of Wagner about either master? 
Would you care for their opinion who never took 
any music seriously? Why should you or I care, 
then, for what the worldly-minded or the curious 
think of Jesus Christ? I bow reverently to every 
serious student of my Master. I have no reproaches 
for earnest men who differ from me. It requires 
all of us to know Him as He really is. But as in the 
days of His passion so now He is His own witness, 
and the proof of His transcendent nature is in the 
faith that He evokes, and in the response of our 
souls to His Word and to His commands. Why if 
the impossible were possible, if He were to vanish 


58 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


altogether from the world, the bare remembrance of 
the beauty and the blessing that vanished with Him 
would make the shadow of His retreating splendor 
more luminous and more efficacious than all the ideas 
that would rush in pell-mell to take His place! 
Once more I think of Melloni, his face turned 
‘eastward, waiting for the rising sun; faith gleaming 
in his eyes, his slender frame a-tremble with expect- 
ancy. Here and there a star looks down upon the 
eager lad who heeds them not, unconscious of their 
lingering. Slowly the great orb rolls upward 
through the crystal atmosphere; swiftly the nerves 
of the watcher thrill to the warmth he seems to see 
and the light he seems to feel. The secret of the 
sunshine that is within him answers to the glory 
that pours upon him. Thrill to thrill. Mystery of 
mind to mystery of matter. Deep of the human soul 
to the great solar deeps so near and yet so far away. 
Tell that marvelous boy that yonder sun is only a 
huge Aurora Borealis; tell him that the thrill within 
him is only a neural tremor, without significance or 
correspondence with any higher truth or any all- 
pervading energy! I think he would turn upon you 
with a quiet smile: Why, man, there is waiting for 
me a great truth to discover, to proclaim, and to ex- 
pound! And so the secret of the Lord is with them 


FaITH. 59 


that fear Him. He that believeth upon the Son of 
God hath the witness in himself! So the Light of the 
world reveals His radiant energy, not to the idler 
upon the roadside, not to the chatterer upon the high- 
way, not to the disputant in the market-place, but to 
the one that seeks Him early and climbs to Him in 
moral earnestness, that He may thrill responsive to 
the first upslanting beam ; to the one that seeks Him, 
not simply for the luxury of contemplation nor the 
increase of knowledge, but that the heart may be 
purer and the life clearer and more beneficent, that 
the home may be sweeter and the workshop nobler 
and the commonwealth reveal Christ’s presence and 
the world rejoice in the coming of His kingdom. 

Faith is not a creed, a schedule of propositions 
to be thumbed mentally like the beads of a rosary; 
faith is the evidence of the Unseen, of the principles 
you live by, of the persons human and Divine in 
whom you trust ; faith is the substance of your hopes 
for time and for eternity. If you have no faith, how 
shriveled and shrunken is the world in which you 
live! If you have no faith, how paltry is the world 
you make! But if you have faith, it is sublimely true 
that all things are possible to him that believeth. 


IV. 
HOME. 


“Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the 
days of the life of thy vanity, which He hath 
given thee under the sun, all the days of thy van- 
ity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy 
labor which thou takest under the sun. Whatso- 
ever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; 
for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, 
nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”— 
Eccl. ix, 9, 10. 


THESE passages belong together, though nearly 
always the latter is torn from the former and made 
the basis of appeals to action and to a desperate ex- 
penditure of strength. 

But the preacher was too sad a man, too familiar 
with the tragedy of common life, too familiar with 
the vanity of all things under the sun to have given 
his voice to that pitiless cry of work, that rings like 
the sound of a fire-bell in the ears of this hustling 


generation. On the contrary, he means to say, and 
60 


HoME. 61 


does say, that the one bright spot in human industry, 
the one sweet prize of earthly ingenuity and earthly 
effort is a perfect home, a round of blessed days with 
the wife of one’s heart and in the household of one’s 
own creation. 

The preacher knew, however, none better than 
he, that a perfect home is not the outcome of mere 
luck or the discovery of a happy moment; it requires 
a clear brain and a glad mind; self-restraint and 
energy, inventive industry and loving patience. It 
must be made in the midst of difficulties, in the pres- 
sence of danger and of death. From the bridal altar 
to the bier is only a step. Therefore live joyfully 
with the wife thou lovest ; there is much for thee to 
do before thy gladness is complete; there is need of 
all thy device, all thy knowledge, all thy wisdom. 
And there is none of these in the grave whither thou 
goest. 

“Until death us do part.” How pathetic the 
words in which the man and woman plight their 
troth to each other! How terrible the necessity 
which compels them to salute the Shadow of Death, 
even at their wedding festival! How swiitly though 
we turn away our eyes! For we shun the inevitable 
with a shiver. In rare moments and with bated 
breath we mention to each other the awful certainty 


62 Tur ANGEL IN THE FLAME, 


of separation. God forbid! we murmur. God post- 
pone the day! Our voices grow unsteady; our eyes 
grow dim ; for a moment we hold each other’s hands ; 
and then the rush of common life sweeps us forward 
into busy forgetfulness again. 

But death, the wise man saw, was not the real 
calamity ; wasted opportunity rather is the one evil 
to be deplored. For a man and woman to have the 
chance of a great happiness together and to fail of 
it, to have about them the making of a happy home, 
and yet never to achieve one, is surely of all tragedies 
the most pitiful, of all earthly failures the most de- 
plorable. 

For is there any sight under the stars more beau- 
tiful than the triumph of loving hearts in the perfec- 
tion of their companionship? Seeing that such a 
triumph is at once a victory over self and over cir- 
cumstance, over evil days and frequent difficulty, 
over ignorance and anxiety, over the weakness of 
human nature, the ravages of time, over the perplex- 
ities of society, and in most cases over the trying 
task of parental responsibility. 

To begin with, then, the home should be recog- 
nized as a Divine institution, ordained of God’s love 
as the institution for which all others—State, 
Church, workshop, school—exist. We are in sad 


Home. 65 


danger, it seems to me, of turning things upside 
down, of making that the chief thing in life which is 
only secondary and auxiliary. We talk about a life- 
work, life-task, life-missions with easy flippancy, 
gliding unconsciously away from the chief task 
which God has laid upon the most of us, the perfec- 
tion of human society in and through the power of 
the home. Doubtless there are those to whom God 
has denied the joy of this task. One gathers from 
the words of St. Paul that there were moments when 
he felt more keenly this sacrifice than all the others 
incident to his mission. Yet even those who have no 
such “portion under the sun” would labor and suffer 
in vain if the home should perish from the face of 
the earth. 

For the true measure of civilization—and Chris- 
tianity is only a celestial civilization slowly working 
itself out upon the earth—the true measure of any 
civilization is found, not in its legislation, nor in its 
architecture, not in its poetry, nor in its politics, not 
in its industry and its commerce, nor even in its 
schools and churches, but in the extent to which all 
of them are made to contribute to the perfection of 
the family and the glory of the home. 

When Henry IV of France declared that he 
wished every peasant in France to have a chicken in 


64 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


the pot for his Sunday dinner, he was, to be sure, 
not thinking very high; but he was thinking in the 
right direction, and he was giving the world in this 
homely phrase the clew to his magnificent adminis- 
tration. He had discovered clearly enough that the 
center of political gravity is the home, not the throne. 
Pericles had touched the same principle in statelier 
words when he contrasted the beauty and the rich 
variety of Athenian life with the scant and severe 
existence of the Spartan, urging his people on to 
sacrifice and to death, rather than basely abandon 
their great achievement. 

Edmund Burke used to say that the chief outcome 
of all the political struggles from Magna Charta 
down was to get twelve good men in a jury box. 
But Burke was clearly wrong. The chief outcome of 
all struggles, political and ecclesiastical, struggles 
with the fist and struggles with the mind, is the lib- 
erty and the power to make a perfect home. 

Secondly, let us recognize that the making of a 
perfect home is a work of art, and not the result of 
luck or happy circumstance. There is indeed a 
genius for architecture and a genius for poetry, a 
genius for science and a genius for music; but how 
slow we are to recognize that the perfect home is 
built by brains! For the outside of our home we 


HoME. 65 


choose, if we can afford it, an architect who has 
studied all styles and who knows every detail neces- 
sary to a perfect structure. We rejoice to see the 
material expression of his thought standing before 
us, with its many features running together into 
unobtrusive but attractive unity. How seldom it 
occurs to us that the invisible interior, the spiritual 
and intellectual home, the library of luminous 
thought, the rooms of love and sweet courtesy and 
gracious interchange of feelings and ideas, are more 
difficult to plan and far more difficult to execute than 
all this work in stone and wood! When the vision 
of the sculptor has taken shape of beauty to our de- 
lighted eyes, we are not silly enough to glory in the 
mallet and the chisel. We praise the Artist’s mind. 
Yet if the rough-hewn block should never yield its 
finest possibility, its veins are not of blood, nor run- 
ning into nerves that suffer torture, and the sculp- 
tor’s blunder sends no suffering through the marble 
fiber. But when we mar with thoughtless words and 
cutting speech the souls intrusted to our love, this 
hurts and keeps on hurting. Our blunder is a 
cruelty, our carelessness a crime. 

Now the life in the family is a life of souls that 
shape each other daily, either into ugliness or beauty. 
The aged mother, fretful, impatient, imperious, irri- 

5 


66 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


table, discontented, is the work too frequently of self- 
ish husband and disobedient children. They com- 
plain of her! God forgive them! They should com- 
plain of themselves, for they have made her what 
she is. That pale-faced girl, gentle, uncomplaining, 
her I mean with the hectic flush upon the cheek, who 
coughs at intervals and laughs to hide her cough,— 
why, she is her mother’s handicraft. Poor child, her 
mother always nags her so! Her fingers are full 
of rings, but a clasp of love were worth them all. 
Gowns! Dear me, she has no end of gowns! And 
the rough brothers are good to her, they think. And 
her father speaks of her with pride, and then lets 
her serve him like a slave. O these blundering sculp- 
tors of a human life, how they mar and mutilate in 
sheer neglect and selfishness the happiness they 
might create! 

But yonder man, so strong, so cheerful, so se- 
renely masterful in times of difficulty,—whose handi- 
craft, pray tell us, is that soul of his? The joint 
work likely of God and himself? Ono! But of the 
mother that loved him, of the wife that he loves, 
of the children that rise up to call him blessed. And 
he has thought about his home. He took pains and 
brains to make it perfect. Busy all his life—for he 
has performed great tasks and evaded no duties— 


Home. 67 


he has for all that never robbed the wife of his love, 
by giving to business the hours that belonged to her; 
he has never cheated his children wholly of their 
father’s presence and their father’s thoughtful care. 
He has faced calamity. Death, too, has struck him 
with his cruel wings—there are moments when his 
features show the traces of recollected gloom—but 
the children as they gather round him rejoice to see 
the touches of their loving hands upon their father’s 
features, even as they feel the touch of his shaping 
intelligence upon their strong souls. While the wife 
of his love rejoices in him and in them, knowing 
quite well that they are the reward of her patient 
thoughtfulness and unwearied hope. This inter- 
change of influence inside the family is at once the 
mystery, the power, and the possible destruction of 
its peace and joy. But the law of it must be grasped 
early and applied with luminous patience and saga- 
cious love. Each household will encounter its own 
problem, and each family must face its own difficul- 
ties; resolutely, courageously, cheerfully to apply 
one’s mind to the solution and the conquest of them 
is the part of wisdom. But the chief thing, I repeat, 
is to recognize the Divine sacredness of the tasks of 
family life, and, having assumed them, to achieve 
them with calculating skill and unwavering affection. 


68 Tur ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


But, thirdly, the home must be created now. For 
there is no knowledge and no device in the grave 
whither we are going. Think, says the wise man, 
how helpless are the dead towards the living. Just 
what power we may have over this world when we 
become immortal spirits none of us may know. But 
one thing is quite clear, any power we may have 
hereafter will be limited by the memories of us in 
the minds of those with whom we lived. Even Jesus 
our Savior submitted to this law. For He wrought 
His image into the hearts of His disciples, of Mary 
and Martha, and the women who ministered to Him, 
so that when He reappeared to them after the resur- 
rection the sound of His voice thrilled their souls 
and the sight of His hands touching the bread He 
blessed told who He was, even as He vanished from 
their bewildered eyes. To-day is richer, if yester- 
day was beautiful. What can to-morrow be for us 
if empty of precious memories? The dead rest from 
their labors and their works do follow them, if there 
are any works to follow. Mother may die, but she 
may leave behind her recollections so gracious, so 
beautiful, so powerful, that her new life with God 
is a perpetual reminder and a perpetual inspiration 
to her children. If she leaves no memories, her grave 
will have no power. The flowers that blossom above ~ 


HoME. 69 


her dust are fragrant with no reminiscences ; and the 
poor dust is powerless to warn or to help, to encour- 
age or toconsole. But if she leaves a precious image 
in her children’s minds, then there is something for 
her angel finger to touch, by which to thrill, to mas- 
ter; then she has left a ladder for her beloved, up 
which their faith can help them climb to be clasped 
once more in her glorified arms. 

Browning has given expression to this idea in the 
wonderful lines addressed to his wonderful wife: 


“O lyric love, half angel and half bird, 
And all a wonder and a wild desire. 
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, 
Can thy soul know change? Hail then, 
And hearken from the realms of help. 
Never may I commence my song, my due 
To God who best taught song by gift of thee, 
Except with bared head and beseeching hand, 
That still despite the distance and the dark 
What was, again may be; some interchange 
Of soul, some splendor once thy very thought, 
Some benediction anciently thy smile.’’ 


You catch the poet’s thought? The whole power of 
his beloved to help him in his loneliness originated 
in the splendor formerly her thought, in the bene- 
diction anciently her smile. God knows, I would not 
make you sad. But death may smite us any moment. 
Shall we have no anchor in the souls of those we 


70 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME, 


love? Shall we drift out into the distance and the 
dark, never again to do them any good? Never to 
help them in their struggles, in their temptations, in 
their defeats, in their agony and sorrow? Aye, we 
shall vanish away into utter helplessness unless we 
do with our might whatever now we find to do. But 
not death itself can break our hold on our beloved 
if we are tender and true, thoughtful and brave, just 
and sagacious, Now. Jesus wrote no books. For 
Him no monument was ever builded. But He loved 
Himself into the hearts of His disciples. Then came 
the Holy Ghost and kindled their recollections of 
Him into life and power for mankind. “I must 
work,” He said, “while it is day, for the night cometh 
in which no man can work.” And therefore in three 
short years He so wrought Himself into the memory 
of the world that the shadow of Him is mightier 
than the substance of the Cesars, anid the echoes of 
His sayings are the consolation of humanity. Go 
thou and do likewise! Do not be dreaming of what 
you are going to do when the globe becomes four- 
cornered and the stars shall shine with colored light. 
Set about doing what you can do now. Not in the 
madness of a sudden impulse, but in the rapture of 
returning tenderness make glad your home with a 
glorious thoughtfulness and diffuse about you the 


Home. 71 


joy of one who loves his fellow-men. Thus, and 
thus only, can you share the immortality of Jesus 
Christ, living with Him at once in heaven and on the 
earth. Powerful as He is powerful in spite of death, 
because like Him you have eternal life with God, 
and eternal memory with them for whom you lived 
and thought and labored. 

But, finally, remember how helpless the living 
always are towards the dead. While they are with 
us we can always do something for them, or at any 
tate show them how gladly we would serve them. 
But when they leave us to return no more they pass 
beyond the reach of our intention and of our think- 
ing and of our activity. To me there is something 
exquisitely painful in the fact that some of my be- 
loved will never need me any more. O! I would 
work my fingers to the bone! I would go without 
food and without sleep, if I could only have again 
the privilege that I once esteemed so lightly, the 
privilege of household ministries. One Sunday 
morning last year the dearest friend* of my early 
manhood dropped unconscious in his pulpit, and was 
carried home to die. Brave and true and good, no 
darkness clings about his fate—he has been gath- 
ered to his fathers, and his fathers are with God. 


* William J. Stephenson. 


72 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


But I rejoice now that for once the last letter was 
mine! That only a few weeks before, even though 
my brain was aching and my eyes were full of pain, 
I had written him how much I loved him, how much 
i thanked him and his wife for all their patience with 
me, and for the welcome that I used to find at their 
home in the lonely days when I had no fireside of 
my own, and when my faith seemed to be breaking 
under the pressure of long and anxious thought. 

It is not always so. Many a time one stands by 
the open grave, smitten with the recollection of the 
thing one intended but forgot to do, or the sudden 
suggestion of what one might have done! And how 
terrible the sense of utter helplessness, of the irrev- 
ocable and irrecoverable and vanished opportuni- 
ties, the chances of sweet courtesies gone forever. 

And how bitter all this is when it touches that 
neglect so common in our modern life, neglect of 
souls. Our heathen ancestors believed in the priest- 
hood of the fathers and the inspiration of the mothers 
of the household. Jesus taught the woman of Sa- 
maria that God is no respecter of places; that He is 
to be worshiped not in the temple made with hands, 
but in the soul fashioned by His own Spirit. And 
where should we look more eagerly for glimpses of 
God than in the spirits of our children and in the 


Homeg, 73 


hearts of our beloved? There is a painful separation 
of our religious from our familiar thoughts. Even 
where the family altar still exists it is often the cen- 
ter of constraint, when it ought to be the delight and 
beauty of the home! And how rare indeed is that 
gracious skill that entrances when the theme is Jesus 
Christ! Why should our tones change and our 
throats become dry and our speech constrained and 
unnatural when we talk of Him and the meaning 
of His life? 

God forbid that I should encourage that flippancy 
of phrase which makes the pious talk of some good 
people rather a barrier than a bridge to heaven! 
And God forbid that any words of mine should re- 
store to our firesides the old spirit of religious dis- 
putation! Both of these are bad; the latter often 
devilish. But might we not learn to talk naturally 
and sweetly about the noblest, richest, dearest real- 
ities of the universe? Might we not in our gayest 
moments and in our wildest merriment think of 
Him who is the source of all pure joy? And could 
we not convey to those about us, sometimes subtly 
and quietly and sometimes with a buoyant frank- 
ness, that we are not ashamed of Jesus Christ? 
Then as your boy grows up to manhood, perceiving 


74 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


how your life was shaped and glorified by faith, he 
too will believe. Then as your daughter opens her 
eyes with strange wonder upon the charms and perils 
of the world, perceiving how all the graces of wo- 
manhood were perfected in her mother by confidence 
in God, she too will turn to seek this fountain of 
perpetual beauty. And as you both grow older, and 
the touch of years whitens your hair, and you begin 
to tremble as you climb the staircase, and a faintness 
in the one brings sudden terror to the other, even 
then you will talk to each other cheerfully, quite con- 
fident of better days beyond. Death will have no 
power to separate you from each other or from the 
children either, because you have done with your 
might whatsoever your hands have found to do. The 
friends of your childhood may fade away, but the 
friends of your children will learn to think of Jesus 
Christ by watching you. The company of those 
that you have helped with word and deed, that you 
have led to your Redeemer by kindly speech and 
brave example, will be always growing larger, and 
you will come to feel yourself an indestructible force, 
a power eternal in the homes and hearts of men. 
But some among you look up wistfully. O 
preacher, our homes are desolate! And some among 
you, though your hearts are merry now, shiver for 


Home. 75 


the moment as you think of a possible loneliness 
when all the present scene has passed away. 

O friends, are there no mercies ye can do? 
Think! Are there no deeds of kindness for you to 
perform? Is there no forgotten friend of your child- 
hood to whom a gift would bring a heart-leap? Is 
there no struggling lad that you might help to his 
ambition? Is there no darkened home to which you 
might bring hope? No blighted soul to whom you 
might bring help? Surely there must be something 
for your hand to do. Do it with thy might, for there 
is no knowledge and no device in the grave whither 
they are going. O we are so helpless towards the 
dead! Once upon a time a scholar sat in his study 
writing. His work was difficult, and taxed his ut- 
most powers. Suddenly a sweet child’s voice 
checked his eager pen. “Papa, you promised to take 
me to see the Christmas things.” “O my darling, 
I’m so busy now. Can’t your mamma go?” The 
little chin began to quiver, the blue eyes filled with 
tears. Soon the child returned, and mother came 
along to plead her cause. The scholar rose and 
kissed his little girl, and sallied forth with cheery 
words to see the windows filled with Christmas 
sights. They never went again. On New-Year’s 
day the body of his little girl was laid away in the 


76 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


grave, which has no knowledge and no device and 
no wisdom. And since then more than once the 
scholar has left his work at Christmas-time to look 
at the windows filled with Christmas things; 
strangers wonder at the gray-haired man whose lips 
move as though he were talking with himself, not 
dreaming of the invisible companion with whom he 
holds converse. Papa, make them happy, make them 
happy now! ‘There is no knowledge, there is no 
device in the grave! And once more thank you, 
bless you, papa, for that happy walk we took to- 
gether the Christmas week before I went away. 


V. 


THE BONDAGE AND DELIVERANCE OF 
CREATION. 


“For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth 
for the manifestation of the sons of God.’—Rom. 
Vili, 19. 


THESE words of St. Paul have haunted me since 
my boyhood. There is in them something like the 
moan of the sea or the roar of the great city; through 
and above this, however, fragments of a melody 
struggling to be heard, the music of a great hope, 
of a patient and indomitable expectation. 

Fragments only of a melody; for the words have 
baffled me again and again, and only recently have 
they ever seemed to disclose their meaning. Much 
that I thought formerly about them appears now to 
have been both wrong and foolish. But these frag- 
ments of a melody, these glimmerings of a vision, 
this partial grasping of a great conception has trans- 
formed, for myself at any rate, the aspect of the sky, 
and woven into the changes of the lake a perpetual 

Tel 


78 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


challenge to do my utmost not to thwart, but to 
accomplish the purposes of God. To put this view 
before your minds, I am going to ask two questions: 

I. WHat pip St. Paul, MEAN? and 

II. WHat CONFIRMATION DOES OUR PRESENT 
KNOWLEDGE GIVE US oF His THoucHT? 

I. Creation, says Paul, has been subjected un- 
willingly to slavery. It is compelled to participate 
in the follies, the crimes, the miseries of men. But 
this participation is not necessary ; because the trans- 
formation of man is possible. Sky and sea, cloud 
and forest, all the splendor and all the strength of 
nature will be delivered from their bondage when 
the sons of God appear. Or to state the principle 
that underlies it all, just in proportion as humanity 
is delivered from bondage are the forces around and 
about humanity released from the service of folly 
and unrighteousness ; just in proportion as any com- 
munity or any nation rises to a divine life, just in 
that proportion do all things swing round, working 
for good to them that love God. The earlier com- 
mentators in explaining this passage went back to 
the well-known words in Genesis, in which the 
ground is cursed for Adam’s sake and the pains of 
child-bearing inflicted upon the mother of all the 
living. But Paul when using the Old Testament 


BoNnDAGE AND DELIVERANCE. 79 


Gealt with it as a book of symbols. To him the 
ancient stories embodied ever-present realities. Men 
and women are always being tempted and always fall- 
ing into disobedience and guilt, and always dragging 
creation into bondage with them. To every forlorn 
Adam and Eve, to guilty humanity everywhere, the 
earth wears an aspect of degradation; that which 
might have been a garden in which the Lord God 
walks becomes a place of thorns and thistles, because 
it becomes a place of follies and of wickedness. The 
energies of creation unite with the transgressions 
of men to make the splendor sordid and to make the 
strength of man his drudgery and sorrow. So that 
a sublime experience like motherhood is fraught with 
pain and anguish, so that the activity of man, which 
of itself should bring perpetual joy, becomes a drudg- 
ery in which we earn our bread in the sweat of our 
faces, even the sunbeams adding to our misery. 
Nothing is more remarkable in St. Paul than the un- 
flinching way in which he depicts the experience of 
the soul and of the world. Both are in a bad way, 
and the whole creation is involved. Splendid forces 
are enchained, great opportunities are hidden from 
human sight, vast and magnificent possibilities of 
happiness lie waiting for a better race of beings. 
Nature is an unwilling captive. The wealth, the 


80 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


energy, the order even of creation has been brought 
into complicity with the folly and the unrighteous- 
ness of men. Let me put my thought back into the 
place and the picture in which it first came to me. 
I was standing at Niagara Falls, at the spot on the 
island where, so the story goes, a foolish father held 
his child over the rushing waters, only to see the boy 
leap into the falling torrent and appear no more. 
“How cruelly treacherous,” I said to myself, “is 
nature even in her majesty and in her beauty! Death 
lurks in her sublimities and destruction in her love- 
liness!” Almost instantly I heard the still small 
voice of protest above the roar of the cataract. 
“We,” remonstrated the foaming waters, “We had 
no part in the father’s recklessness. We are in 
bondage. He found his way hither bringing along 
his smiling child, and trifled with us. Behind us was 
the resistless push of natural law, the permanent will 
of God, from which there is no escape. And thus 
we become unwilling partners in the follies and 
crimes that men commit. If fools fling themselves 
into our sweeping splendors, how can we prevent it? 
Tf engineers come hither to employ our energies, and 
the result is, after all, only more drudgery for human 
hands and brains, is that our doing? We are wait- 
ing, expecting earnestly the manifestation of the 


BONDAGE AND DELIVERANCE. 81 


sons of God. When they appear, when men and 
women are both wise and good, we shall no longer 
be unwilling instruments of human folly and un- 
righteousness ; we shall become the willing servants 
of this redeemed and glorified humanity.” 

Since then I have found the following words in 
a powerful drama written by the Norwegian poet, 
Bjornson, one of the noblest (if not the very noblest) 
figures of existing literature. They are placed by 
him upon the lips of a character typical of what is 
truest, sweetest, divinest in modern womanhood! 

“Does not Nature,’ she exclaims, “does not 
Nature cry to us, ‘Shame! Shame! You spatter 
blood upon my leaves and mingle death-cries with 
my songs. You darken the air before me with cruel 
complaints.’ So Nature cries to us. ‘My spring- 
tide is defiled by you. Your sickness, your evil 
thoughts skulk about in the green turf. Every- 
where, like stagnant water, is the smell of misery.’ 
So Nature cries to us. ‘Your greed and your envy 
are a pair of twins that have fought each other from 
- birth. Only my highest mountains, only my desert 
strands, my ice-floes have not seen them; elsewhere 
on every fold of earth traces of blood and hoarse 
cries tell of their presence. In the midst of my eter- 


nal beauty men have thought out a hell and kept it 
6 


82 Tur ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


full. Rubbish and curses have they mingled with my 
loveliness and my purpose of perfection.’” This I 
take it, is the modern expression of Paul’s idea. 
The earth must carry her vast multitudes through 
space, whether they utter songs or cries, whether 
they beat out each other’s brains or delight each 
other’s souls; the sun must shine upon the activities 
of men, whether they fill their habitations with 
misery or their homes with gladness. The grain 
must go to the mill or to the distillery as men may 
decree, to furnish food or misery. The wind, the 
iron, and the water must turn man’s machinery for 
him, whether it increases happiness or increases woe. 
In a word, all the strength and all the splendor of 
nature are degraded whenever and wherever man 
degrades himself. And they are liberated and en- 
nobled whenever man exalts himself. 

This is Paul’s first thought, but he adds exult- 
ingly another. This enslavement is not perpetual. 
For man’s ignorance and folly and sin are not neces- 
sary. On the contrary, man’s exaltation, man’s re- 
demption, is in the plan of God, and with it comes 
the deliverance of nature from this involuntary bond- 
age. It is a false view of man and of nature to re- 
gard man as the slave of his surroundings, however 
grand and splendid these may be. Man is a slave 


~ 


BONDAGE AND DELIVERANCE. 83 


only so long as he yields his members to unrighteous- 
ness, and the bondage of nature is the consequence 
and not the cause of his degradation. Let him rise 
to his full might as the son and heir of God; let him 
be free in Jesus Christ ; let humanity once grasp the 
purpose of God, and spring forward to meet and to 
achieve it; lo! from hidden fountains will stream 
emancipated powers; the whole creation that now 
groans and travails together will become melodious 
with a song sweeter and grander than that of the 
morning stars because of this appearance of the sons 
of God. Let me refer to another master of modern 
thought, Arthur Helps, one of the sanest of English 
historians and philosophers. Concluding his remark- 
able “Friends in Council,” he speaks of the resources 
of nature as locked up, so to speak, until the human 
races rise high enough in the moral scale to use them 
righteously. 

Now I know that current thought runs in a dif- 
ferent direction. Conquer the spiritual through the 
material is the modern talisman. And there is a 
tone of exultation in those who speak of our physical 
science as though man had already conquered nature. 
Never until man conquers himself can he deliver 
nature from her bondage and become the owner of 
her wealth. Until he conquers himself, until he be- 


84 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


comes indeed the very son of God, every increase 
of knowledge and of power is fraught with peril 
and possibilities of woe. Such is the meaning of 
Paul, and such was the teaching of Jesus. Never 
can man enter upon his great inheritance until he is 
transformed by the Spirit of God, never until he 
adopts freely the Eternal Father who has subjected 
these things to him can he have that perfect co- 
operation with the forces of the world, that perfect 
use of the riches of creation. Nature groans and 
waits, and waits and groans for the manifestation 
of the sons of God. 

II. If this is what St. Paul means, let us turn then 
to the second question. How far is this view of na- 
ture’s degradation and deliverance confirmed by mod- 
ern knowledge? 

1. It is confirmed, it seems to me, by our modern 
discovery of universal, all-prevailing law. How did 
we reach it? By simple honesty; by rejecting false- 
hood about the creation in which we live. A noble 
company of thinking martyrs have destroyed the 
errors in which creation was enslaved. There was 
a time when the sky was alive with spooks and 
witches; the midocean, before the days of Colum- 
bus, was imagined to be a region of supernatural 
terrors, through which no mariner could sail alive. 


BONDAGE AND DELIVERANCE. 85 


But now the sea and the sky have been cleansed of 
this foul brood of a fertile human ignorance, and the 
stars no longer frighten us with baleful fancies born 
of human cruelty and human dread. So far as na- 
ture has been delivered, she has been delivered from 
the bondage of falsehood and vindictiveness, which 
of old she was compelled to serve. For it must never 
be forgotten that the malign spirits that roamed 
abroad and blighted lives were only the shadows of 
human hate and human fear. It is a great mistake 
to overlook the moral causes which have helped us 
to this knowledge, and a still graver one to forget 
that this knowledge only helps us to a beneficent use 
of nature and nature’s storehouse of energy as we 
come closer to the image of our Lord. And this our 
boasted knowledge, this very idea of law, may be- 
come a new superstition if we do not cherish and 
apply the teaching of St. Paul. The ogre Necessity, 
with his twin children, heredity and environment, 
threatens to destroy our birthright in Jesus Christ. 
Imagine yourself a thing, a mere product, a mere 
-effect ; lo! you, and nature with you, will sink to the 
cld slavery! Unless you think of yourself as a pos- 
sible son of God, mightier than heredity and might- 
ier than environment because supported by God’s 
indwelling Spirit, you will drag creation, in spite 


86 Tus ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


of its majesty and its magnitude, down to your own 
sad level. The universe is neither your master nor 
your slave. The universe changes as you change. 
You need not shrivel as the stars grow large; you 
need not drop down whining because you can not 
make the sun rise in the west. But the stars will 
shrivel if you shrink, and all the processes of nature 
will be unable to help you if you do not by God’s 
grace assert yourself to be the child of the Eternal 
God, ready to cope with all the forces about you, and 
to co-operate with them to do the Father’s will. 

The false conception of law as necessity degrades 
humanity and degrades nature by making of both 
blind and helpless things. It makes creation empty, 
for nowhere is there any God. Law rightly con- 
ceived is only an aspect of Him; only the expression 
of His permanent being. It tells us that God has 
character; that He is not fickle, whimsical, capri- 
cious, arbitrary; that God is not like an indulgent 
parent, the slave of our desires. Strange, therefore, 
that men should torture so magnificent an idea as 
that of universal law into a proof of God’s absence 
from creation. Why, law is the proof that He is 
always and everywhere present. But this universal 
frame is helpless to convince us if we do not grow in 
moral stature; and we repeat the old process with 


BONDAGE AND DELIVERANCE. 87 


our new discovery: ““Professing ourselves to be wise 
we become fools, our reasonings become vain, and 
our foolish hearts are darkened.” 

Nature forbids no man to pray. But he may be- 
cloud nature with this new superstition until she 
seems to do it. Shall I pray to Him? “Turn the 
question round,” says nature. Will you praise Him? 
Will you rejoice in the order that He has estab- 
lished? Will you wait patiently for Him in the time 
of drought and storm and calamity? Do you not 
know, foolish mortal, that desires are prayers? That 
you can not help praying? Will you seek the mind 
of Jesus, who rejoiced to see His Father sending 
rain upon just and unjust, and causing His sun to 
shine on the evil and the good? And will you em- 
ploy your increased knowledge for the deliverance 
of nature from base uses? ‘Then you will praise 
and pray as never before. Do the angels pray, I 
wonder? Upon first thought one might think not, 
for surely in the long companionship with God they 
have acquired trust in Him and are beyond the need 
of prayer! Well, an archangel would pray if he 
were scared just as naturally as Simon Peter did; 
though an archangel might not be frightened easily. 
Only a tremendous break in the order of things, only 
a far-reaching exercise of God’s strength and inge- 


88 Ture ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


nuity could shake him into perplexity and prayer. 
Consider this, however: Prayer is a candid inter- 
change of thought with God, and when we so con- 
ceive it, it follows that the mightiest ought to pray 
the most. For to them the great desire should be to 
use their powers rightly. The one great thing to 
learn is the will of God in every crisis of our enter- 
prises. So that if God should heap upon me power 
and opportunity, if He should lay the solar system 
at my feet, I should not need Him less, but more. 

Plant and planet, sunbeam and lightning, multi- 
tudinous waves and multitudes of men, the wealth 
of the mountains and the energies of mind; these 
hast Thou given me, O God! Then teach me how 
to use them! Then show me how to reach the ut- 
most of Thy great intention! O! what a world it 
would be if every possessor of wealth, if every 
wielder of authority and power, knelt daily with 
Jesus at the feet of God praying sincerely, “Thy 
kingdom come! Thy will be done in earth as it is 
in heaven!” 

2. But this view of St. Paul is confirmed by our 
modern knowledge of ourselves. Do not be fright- 
ened. I am not going into the intricacies of psy- 
chology ; I shall not carry you into metaphysical fog- 
banks. I shall be content to point out that our mod- 


BONDAGE AND DELIVERANCE. 89 


ern researches teach us that each of us builds his 
own world, that the sky is one thing to dog Diamond 
and another thing to Sir Isaac Newton, and neces- 
sarily so. Because Diamond brings to it a canine 
brain and a canine heart. How slowly my teachers 
convinced me that the rainbow and the blue dome 
of the sky were creations of my own, and that the 
universe changed as I grew larger and wiser and 
more pure. But this law of my own being need not 
dismay me. For as I rise in the scale of being—and 
rise, thank God, I can—the universe ceases to be the 
bond slave of my evil thoughts and purposes, and 
becomes the helper and supporter of my new nature. 
To the color-blind the iridescent clouds have no ex- 
istence ; to the cruel-hearted and selfish, nature has 
no beneficent uses. Microscopes and _ telescopes 
brought hidden worlds from darkness. O! for en- 
largement of our spiritual vision, that we might 
discover the wealth of happiness stored away in 
these forces now enslaved to human pride and arro- 
gance and greed. Paul is referred to constantly in 
our time as the one who transformed Christianity 
into a theology. Do people never read the thirteenth 
of First Corinthians or the eighth of Romans any 
more? Faith and Hope and Love; with these Paul. 
expected to deliver not humanity only, but all cre- 


90 Tur ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


ation from bondange, expecting the latter to become 
an instrument of justice and of joy as soon as the 
sons of God appeared. 

You know the story of the tailor at Niagara who 
at sight of the rainbows rising from the snow-white 
columns and the waters shattered into foam laid his 
petty soul across the splendor, crying, “What a 
place to sponge a coat!” So we stain creation with 
our stinginess and discontent, and our moods of 
petulance and anger and hatred, until the whole vast 
splendor becomes a mere echo of our pettiness and 
folly. 

Looking once at a masterpiece, a picture of storm 
and rain, I said to myself: “But if you had seen that 
in nature, if God had given you a picture worth even 
in its transient beauty a thousand such as that, you 
would have spread your petty self across the land- 
scape and dreaded catching cold.” The clouds be- 
came to Hamlet a congregation of foul and pestilen- 
tial vapors; and the whole creation is for an unre- 
deemed humanity the slave of mean desire. There 
is but one skepticism, and only one, that I fear; it is 
the malignant doubt of God’s transforming power. 
This is undermining our belief in the grandeur of 
man and of human destiny ; this is postponing indefi- 
nitely the appearance of the sons of God for which 


— 


BoNDAGE AND DELIVERANCE. gI 


creation groans; this crucifies the Christ of our 
age between two thieves, Inaction and Desperation. 
On the one hand incarnate sloth insisting that misery 
is necessary, that it always has been, and always will 
be, a part of the world, and that there is nothing to 
do about it; on the other hand incarnate credulity 
ready for any wild experiment that promises a New 
Jerusalem. No! No! The manifestation of the 
sons of God! Therein lies the future of humanity. 
O that this age might strip from it this poisoned 
spirit of unbelief! O that it would cease to listen to 
them that deride as a dream the inflow of God into 
the soul that seeks Him. O that men would crave 
the spirit of adoption, the spirit that adopts God, 
whereby we cry, “Abba, Father,” until the Spirit 
Himself beareth witness with our spirits that we are 
the sons of God. 

This old world has seen much that is noble and 
Divine, but it has never yet seen such a company. 
It has seen much sacrifice, lives poured out freely, 
but, God knows, quite often to very little purpose. 
What creation groans for, what it earnestly expects 
is the company of the intelligent righteous, the com- 
pany that thinks wisely and plans divinely and co- 
operates harmoniously each with the other and with 
the energies of nature to do the will of God. 


VI. 
SIMON PETER AND JUDAS ISCARIOT. 


“And he [Peter] went out, and wept bitterly.”— 
Matt. xxvi, 75. 

“And he [Judas] cast down the pieces of silver in 
the temple and departed, and went and hanged 
himself .’—Matt. xxvii, 5. 


HERE are two pictures of sin and its conse- 
quences; one of them pathetic, the other terrible. 
Yet neither of them lies outside of the experiences 
of common life. Every great leader has been de- 
serted in the crisis of his fate; treachery and betrayal 
have stained nearly all the great moral enterprises 
ever undertaken in this selfish world. And we might 
count ourselves a happy people if traitors were never 
found except among the followers of the great. But 
treachery and desertion have blighted many a home 
and ruined many a friend, have wrecked many a 
bank and many a business, and beggared many a 
widow and many an orphan, and more than one 
community. 

92 


Srmon PETER AND JupAs IscarioT. 93 


Jesus when He was denied by Simon Peter 
shared the misfortune of thousands who have been 
abandoned by their friends in the hour of trial and 
agony. Jesus when betrayed by Judas tasted the 
bitterness that has poisoned lives for centuries, the 
bitterness of affection wasted, of kindness and for- 
bearance spent generously for naught. 

Both these men were His disciples, members of 
that inner circle chosen to be the daily companions 
of our Lord. Both of them were intimate with Him, 
though each in a different way. Peter had been with 
Him in the hour of His transfiguration ; he had been, 
if not the first to grasp, at any rate the first to pro- 
claim His superhuman character. Partly because of 
his impulsive and energetic nature, partly because 
of the favor of the Master he had acquired a kind of 
leadership among the twelve. It was not always a 
wise leadership, and never an undivided one. The 
sons of Zebedee opposed him openly, and through 
their mother urged their claim to highest places and 
superior power. Judas, on the other hand, fomented 
discontent among the less-favored disciples, watch- 
ing eagerly to further his own schemes and to in- 
crease his opportunities. For the peculiar office of 
Judas brought him of necessity into very close rela- 
tions with the Master. This is plain enough from 


94 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


the saying of John, who tells us that when Jesus — 
spoke to Judas the famous but pathetic words, “That 
thou doest, do quickly,” the other disciples thought 
that he was to carry out some plan before agreed 
upon between them, to make some purchase for the 
feast, or to make some contribution to the poor. 
Judas carried the bag, but Jesus directed the use 
of the money. They met together and talked over 
the income and the outgo; what they might expect 
to have, and what they might expect to spend or 
to give away. Judas, a hard-fisted, unsentimental 
money-getter, Kad doubtless seen with rising scorn 
the impractical methods of the Master. He saw 
plainly enough abundant opportunities to exploit the 
popular enthusiasm and to fill the treasury of the 
new kingdom. ‘That Jesus was so little practical, 
had so little faith in the power of money, made such 
poor use of fame and of His opportunities to enrich 
Himself and His followers, and to provide a revenue 
for the future, must have filled him with disappoint- 
ment and chagrin. And then those quick eyes of 
the Master were always full of rebuke. Jesus knew 
him and pitied him. The words “one of you is a 
devil,” were not words of reproach or of condem- 
nation. They were words of tender and deep sym- 
pathy. From the beginning Jesus followed Judas 


S1MoN PETER AND JuDAS IscaRIoT. 95 


as a mother watches a crippled child. He chose for 
him a place of responsibility, which would of neces- 
sity bring them frequently together. In their talks 
about the use of money, it is easy to imagine that 
Jesus would reach all the secret places of His tempted 
disciple’s heart and help him with all the wisdom 
and all the sweetness of His own nature. It is quite 
remarkable that Judas alone of all the disciples is 
recorded as having kissed Him. Even in the mo- 
ment of betrayal Jesus calls him friend. And the 
undertone of quiet horror with which the evangelists 
refer to his treachery seems to indicate both a won- 
der at the patience and the long-suffering of Jesus 
and an unwillingness on their part to-utter any con- 
demnation other than the story of the terrible 
tragedy. , 

Peter’s denial we can easily understand. His sin 
is on the surface. He had over-rated his strength. 
Just as he had leaped into the water, expecting it 
to be for him a solid floor, and lost his assurance 
when he found it yielding to his weight, so he had 
hurried to the high priest’s palace, his heart stirred 
with love and curiosity and anxious perturbation. 
But he could no more tread the sea of danger with 
the calm majesty of Jesus Christ than he could tread 
the waves of Galilee. The consciousness of peril 


96 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


unmanned him; it swept away instantly the mem- 
ory of all his boasts and all his protestations, of the 
prophecy of Jesus and of His own self-confident re- 
joinder. His courage turned in a flash to cowardice; 
the lie came leaping to his lips; a kind of fury shook 
the denial and the curses from his throat; it was only 
a moment, but a moment of infinite timidity and 
meanness. 

But the treachery of Judas is not an act; it is a 
series of thoughts and deeds. Here is both calcu- 
lation and a struggle; deliberate plan and sudden im- 
pulse; the search for opportunity; the counter-bal- 
ancing of motives; the selection of spot and method, 
and yet at the last precipitate resolve. 

Clearly Judas did not expect to see his Lord con- 
demned. ‘The instant revulsion in his case is far 
more startling and terrible than in the case of Peter. 
Tears are always a relief, even when the strain that 
compels them is superhuman in its weight of misery. 
But the eyes of Judas are fierce and dry. Things 
have not gone as he expected. Jesus is unpractical 
to the last. As He would not convert His power and 
His reputation into money, so now He will not wield 
a carnal weapon to gain His liberty. All the warn- 
ings of his Master have come back; all the loving 
looks; all the urgent remonstrances; all the frank, 


Stmon PETER AND JuDAs IsCARIOT. 97 


persistent entreaties hammer at his brain. In the 
bitter lamentation, “I have betrayed innocent blood,” 
all that is meanest and all that is noblest in Judas 
come to light. He had sinned against knowledge 
and sinned against conscience; but he had sinned 
under the stress of an avaricious nature, under the 
goadings of detected shame, under the lash of cruel 
disappointment. But he had sinned against his only 
real Friend, against the only Being who loved him, 
the only Being who could have saved him from 
himself, against One who had always been gentle 
and forbearing with him, who, even in the agony of 
the betrayal, had called him friend, and had not re- 
fused to kiss him in spite of the venom on his lips. 

Yet different as the denial of Peter and the be- 
trayal of Judas are, and different as are the motives 
that lead up to them, they are alike in this—in show- 
ing us the limits of Christ’s influence over human 
character. Three years these men had lived in His 
presence, subject to His teaching and to His per- 
sonal charm, and yet both fell; one of them to rise 
again, one to rise no more. It is impossible to over- 
value a good environment. Blessed indeed are the 
young men who come under the magic and the 
majesty of pure and lofty character, of noble parents, 
noble teachers, noble friends. Blessed indeed are 

7 \ 


98 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


the young women who find in the days of their power 
and their peril some gracious personality to weave 
about them the pictured possibilities of lovely and 
beneficent womanhood. If I complain of society, it 
is because society abandons itself often to leaders 
that think only of meaner things, of the cut and color 
of garments rather than the shape and splendor of 
the soul; of bric-a-brac and decorations, rather than 
the sure foundations of character; of what we eat 
and what we drink and wherewithal shall we be 
clothed, rather than of the kingdom of God and the 
righteousness of Jesus Christ. And yet, my son, 
even though the shadow of God be resting on your 
father’s house and its walls be hallowed with the 
prayers and aspirations of a saintly mother, your feet 
may go astray. And you, my daughter, even though 
your dearest friend may be a saint, whose “eyes are 
homes of silent prayer” and whose speech is rich 
with heavenly wisdom, even then you may be secret- 
ing daily thoughts of a kind to ruin you, and feelings 
to corrode your soul. ‘No one becomes bad sud- 
denly,” said the Latin poet. This is saying too much, 
perhaps ; but it is safe to say no one becomes a traitor 
suddenly. Treason is by its very nature perverted 
friendship, and that requires time. Men and women 
become treacherous in spite of gracious influences 


Stmon PETER AND JuDAS IscaRIOT. 99 


and in spite of what is good in themselves. They 
begin with small deceits and petty subterfuges, and 
pass on through concealment to hypocrisy. 

Judas did not expect to steal when first intrusted 
with the bag; no more than my friend the cashier, 
who robbed the bank and hanged himself. Judas 
began, as most men begin, by dallying with the 
thought. How easily it might be accomplished! 
Who would ever find it out? Why Jesus did not 
even know what money came in, nor how much He 
wasted in His queer charities. And then it belonged 
to all of them anyhow. Besides it would be easy to 
get the bag replenished from the enthusiasts that 
followed Him if Jesus would only learn the cash 
value of enthusiasm! Was He Messiah really? He 
seemed to be when He turned on Judas those solemn, 
searching eyes; and when He chided him with warn- 
ing and remonstrance; or when He expostulated 
with forgiving love, and explained to him the devil 
that possessed him and encouraged him to fight 
desperately to down him. But the tempter urged 
him and the devil mastered him; the thought that he 
dallied with became desire, and desire, deed. Then 
the sense of guilt took hold of him; he shrank away 
from Jesus, murmuring: “Now He knows I am a 
thief, and although He feigns to confide in me, His 


100 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


eyes accuse me, reproach me, sting me; I would 
rather He drove me from Him as a thief. But He 
likes to use me. I am sordid, but I am thrifty too. 
My peculations are small; they are poor pay for my 
services. With my talents for management, I might 
easily get rich. And if His kingdom ever comes to 
anything, I shall have my chance. What can these 
others do compared with me; they have no gifts for 
business. So I’ll stay. The Master tells me that I 
have a devil; that I ought to cast him out; indeed, 
He offered to do it for me, if I would fast and pray 
and conquer this greed and selfishness. I care noth- 
ing for His predictions; they never make me shud- 
der. But His lovingkindness often terrifies me; 
iz is as though He would save me from some horror 
that hovers about me; it is as though He were 
goaded by some dreadful fear on my account. I 
have no devil; no more than Simon Peter has, who 
will ruin us all by his rash tongue and sudden turns. 
I have no devil; no more than John Zebedee, whose 
love is half-sentiment, half-sham. JI would do more 
for Jesus than either of them. ‘Who is to be the 
greatest?’ they are always asking. Well, I shall hold 
the bag, and they shall have the glory; I shall look 
out for the solid benefits, and they may have the 
decorations. Yet Jesus disturbs me with those pierc- 


SIMON PETER AND JuDAs IscARIOT. IOI 


ing tones and penetrating looks; I try not to listen, 
to think of other things, and force myself to look at 
Him full face. I would hate Him if I could.” 
And so his brain became a tumult of suspicions 
and alarms, of dislike and envy and misconception. 
For once the deed of infidelity is done, the thought 
of treachery takes root and spreads, the traitor begins 
to excuse his baseness to himself, and the readiest 
form of excuse is to cheapen the virtue of his com- 
panions, and to degrade in his own eyes the soul that 
he is betraying. “Everybody does it!’ “Does Job 
serve God for naught?” “Jesus is a fraud; at any 
rate a failure, and His kingdom is a dream!” Thus 
muttered Judas to himself. “He charms men and 
enchants women and children; He does many won- 
drous things. But who knows? ‘The Pharisees 
may not be wrong in their suspicions. Perhaps He 
is in league with Beelzebub—how base a thing am 
I become to think that thought! But suppose He 
founds His kingdom? Unless I have some stronger 
claim Peter and James and John will keep me fight- 
ing for my place. Why should He let Himself be 
taken if He is the Messiah; if as He claims He is 
the Son of God supported by the legions of heaven? 
And if He declares Himself with power in the mo- 
ment of His arrest, why then I have planned that 


102 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


very thing. What will they give me for Him? Fie! 
Judas, fie! No! Ill never sell Him ;—although 
there ’s money in it, and big money, too.” 

For men when parleying with the devil are 
neither logical nor consistent. Ideas at once dis- 
cordant and distracting dance through their minds; 
but only one of these ideas abides in overmastering 
energy, that of the contemplated wickedness. A 
man is not as the company he keeps; he may consort 
with saints, as Judas walked with Christ; he may 
have fellowship with Gabriel and Michael like Luci- 
fer; but “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” 
When he is alone and free from the influences that 
benumb the devil that he harbors, then it is that he 
abandons himself to the tempter, preparing the vo- 
lition for the finished deed by nursing the idea. 

Look at Judas face to face with Jesus; the Mas- 
ter is discussing with him some projects of sweet 
charity, and the hard features reflect the Master’s 
charm! Look at him watching the Magdalene as 
she breaks the box of precious ointment! Listen to 
the “tears in his voice” as he mentions the poor who 
are robbed by this sentimental waste! Does he rise 
to the kingly nature of Jesus? Is he entranced by 
the grace and dignity and power that Jesus reveals 
to him in every conversation? Does the Magdalene’s 


SIMON PETER AND JuDAS IscaRIOT. 103 


boundless affection thrill him to tender thoughts? 
For the moment, Yes! But instantly he finds him- 
self alone, the question starts up again—How much 
would He bring if He were sold? 

It belongs to the poet to depict these fearful en- 
counters of the soul with Satan. And yet I question 
whether these pictures do much good; indeed it 
sometimes seems as though they did harm chiefly. 
The story of Gretchen’s ruin, though told in rich 
diction and made sweet with intoxicating music, has 
decoyed more souls to hell than it has saved. There 
is a baleful contagion in crime that makes the picture 
of it poison. And there is a truth that teachers and 
parents and librarians need to remember in the lines: 

“Vice is a monster of such frightful mien 
That to be hated, needs but to be seen ; 


But seen too oft, familiar with her face 
We first endure, then pity, then embrace!” 


Why, then, you ask me, do you bring to us this 
story of avarice and treachery? Let me tell you! 
For thirty years and more I have been a teacher, and 
in that time I have been the father-confessor of many 
a youth. Often have I thanked God for the influ- 
ence, the saving influence of parents and relatives 
and friends and sweethearts and for the power of 
Christ. But I have witnessed more than one do- 


104 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


mestic tragedy where the love of mother and of 
sweetheart, where the father’s affection and the 
friend’s devotion and the nearness of Jesus and the 
striving of the Holy Ghost all failed. And I know 
of nothing more appalling, nothing so heartrending 
as this helplessness of love. The companionship of 
Christ could not save Judas; Satan reached and con- 
quered him, while Jesus washed his feet and tried 
in vain the look that melted Peter’s heart. 

Rejoice, my lad, in the nobility of your father, 
in the gentleness of your mother, in the beauty and 
purity of your sweetheart, for these may help to save 
you in the hour of fierce trial. But remember these 
alone will not suffice. Rejoice, my daughter, in your 
home and the sweet influences that have shaped your 
being, rejoice in the gracious restraints and dear 
compulsions that are for us mortals as the arms of 
God. But remember these are not enough. You 
must fill your mind with pure thoughts and your 
heart with sweet intentions, lest the tempter find lodg- 
ment in the vacant place. It is not enough to be 
loved; you must learn to love. And your love must 
learn to be considerate, and ingenious, and active; 
not a gush of feeling, but a constant flow of caressing 
thought and helpful deed. 

There is a teaching rife just now that is perilous 


Stmon PETER AND JUDAS IscCARIOT. 105 


and corrosive. It is particularly dangerous because 
it is adulterated, poisoned truth. I mean thereby 
that the truth of the teaching conceals the venom 
that mixes subtly with it and leads to our soul’s 
undoing. You are told that you are by nature the 
children of God; that the noble impulses within you 
are a witness of your origin, and that you need only 
recognize the fact of God’s love to enter the king- 
dom of heaven. Now you are His children; you do 
serve God with the law of your minds; He does love 
you, and the recognition of His love is a step towards 
your salvation! But, my children, O my children! 
“There is a law in your members that wars against 
the law of your mind.” And with your members 
you may become the slaves of sin and death. “For 
to be carnally-minded is death.” Mark you, Paul 
says carnally-minded. And again he speaks of that 
law of the members conquering the law of the mind. 
There lurks the danger, this subjugation of the 
spirit to the flesh, this saturation of your thoughts 
with evil appetite and wrong desire. God loves you. 
Every lofty thought and brave ideal and noble as- 
piration is indeed a leading of His Spirit. But this 
love, these thoughts, these entrancing ideals will not 
save you. Salvation is not thought nor feeling, but 
life and light and love. Jesus loved Judas; Judas 


106 Tur ANGEL IN THE FLAME, 


knew that Jesus loved him. But the recognition 
of that love could not save him. And it will fail to 
save you. The love of the mother that prays for you ~ 
night and morning, the love of the wife that would 
die rather than know you to be untrue, the love of 
the children for whom you are honor and safety, 
the love of friends that would pour out strength and 
wealth to redeem you from dishonor; all these have 
their limits. So also has the love of Christ and God. 
You must do more than recognize their love; you 
must love them in return, and conquer the law of 
your members in the strength of this affection. The 
love of Christ saves and perfects you only when it 
coaxes and constrains your soul to love Him. For 
the law of human life is this: He that loseth his soul 
in others shall find it again. You must never be con- 
tent with being loved; you must love. With an 
affection that will not grieve nor hurt nor betray; 
with an affection that devises and accomplishes proj- 
ects of mercy and kindness; with an affection whose 
watchword is that entrancing summary of God’s 
eternal goodness: It is more blessed to give than to 
receive. 

Finally, the stories of these two disciples are in- 
structive for another reason. Each repented. But 
how different the pictures ; the one pathetic, the other 


SIMON PETER AND JuDAS IsCARIOT. 107 


somber; the one troubled with the memory of the 
Master’s power, the other with the memory of His 
impotence to save! The tears of Peter weeping bit- 
terly revive the recollections that terror obliterated. 
The sight of Jesus led away to Pilate’s judgment- 
seat kindled the soul of Judas into torturing flame. 
His clutch is on the silver; but each piece scorches 
him with blistering pain. The scorpions of his con- 
science sting him to madness. His calculating brain 
stands still; one crazy expedient urges him forward. 
Back to the chief priests and elders; back with the 
accursed stuff! He gave up Christ for silver; how 
gladly would he gather and give up silver to set free 
his Lord! It is all coming true; just as Jesus told 
him. He has done it at last; he has betrayed his 
Master. O why do things look so different before 
and after their commission? Why did his devil, 
how could his desire blind him so? “I have betrayed 
innocent blood!” With hot and hungry eyes he 
faces the hypocrites that hired him. “What is that 
tous? See thou to that!” is the sullen reply. Down 
with the pieces of silver; out from the sanctuary; 
away from the chief priests and the elders; any- 
where, anywhere, away from himself! “Whither 
he goes is hell; himself is hell!” 

Why did he not rush to Jesus and find help in His 


108 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


forgiving love? Jesus is with Pilate; the soldiers 
guard the entrance to the governor’s hall. He can but 
perish in the attempt. And one look of that sweet 
face were worth his life. Shall he seek for Peter and 
John? Peter might help him in his misery; but 
Judas had not seen Peter weeping over his denial. 
The Boanerges might scourge him from His pres- 
ence, for there were depths of wrath in him! Pilate 
has condemned Jesus. Will Jesus die? Why not 
wait to see the end, perhaps a burst of power? Peter 
waited ; in spite of his denial and his cowardice, the 
memory of Christ kept hold of him; his hope and 
love survive. But Judas could not wait. He had 
no hope. If the Master were to come down from the 
cross and establish His throne in the face of His 
enemies there would be no place for him, so Judas 
thought. For this is the worst of human meanness, 
it destroys all faith in magnanimity O why, why 
did he not suffer Jesus to cast that devil out? Then 
instead of clutching pennies and contriving small 
deceits and plotting treachery, he would have loved 
His Master to some purpose. For granting that he 
had a devil, granting that he like many a man was 
loaded down from the beginning with a greedy, sus- 
picious, violent nature; Jesus had explained all that 
and offered him His own and His Father’s help. 
But he would not! 


Simon PETER AND JuDAS ISCARIOT. 109 


And even now, if he had only known, all was not 
lost. Even now he could follow the crowd and fling 
himself at the foot of the Cross and give the world 
a picture of forgiveness more beautiful than that of 
the repentant thief. For He that spoke comfort to 
the malefactor, He that prayed forgiveness for His 
enemies, He would have soothed the misery of Judas, 
if he had crawled towards Him and risked his life 
for one last loving look. Alas! Alas! Men who 
suffer the evil one to blind their eyes to the gran- 
deur and beauty of love never can measure its value 
in the hour and article of despair! “He went and 
Why do treachery and infidelity 


1? 


hanged himself 
terminate so frequently in suicide? Is it that the 
traitor’s eyes are holden so that he never sees the 
baseness of the deed until it is done and is reflected 
from every face that he beholds? Or is it not rather 
that in the hour of discovery he finds himself bereft 
of faith in man and faith in God, expecting his be- 
loved to reproach him and his children to rise up and 
ery, “Accursed!” and Christ Himself to hide His 
face in wrath? I do not know. I do not care to 
consider. I should, though, if every traitor hanged 
himself. But the modern Judas flaunts his treason 
in our faces and stalks around without a twinge of 
conscience or a touch of penitence. He gilds his 


IIO Tur ANGEL IN THE FLAME, 


wickedness with euphemisms; he has fine names for 
his ugly deeds; and never lacks defenders and 
idolaters. 

“Judas went and hanged himself.” And now we 
speak of him as the arch-traitor of humanity. We 
confuse the grandeur of the victim with the mean- 
ness of the treachery ; and so make Judas worse than 
men of equal greed and far less sensibility. For no 
trait of modern avarice is more diabolical than its 
callous indifference to the woe that it causes and the 
ruin in its track. 

“Judas went and hanged himself.” He shrank 
from the light of the sun and the memory of his 
Master’s face. But you that listen to me! If you 
shall ruin the innocent or devour widows’ houses; 
if you shall for pelf, be it paltry or colossal, betray 
the friend or the community that trusts you; if you, 
surrounded by ministries of tender affection and 
living in the shadow of Jesus Christ, if you shall 
make havoc of your homes; if you, who have known 
the touch of the Master and seen the light of His 
eyes, shall betray His cause in the midst of a doubt- 
ing and perverse generation; then you must take 
your place with Judas, even though like him you 
have kissed the Lord of Life and Glory. 


VIL. 
THE JOY OF JESUS. 


“These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy 
might remain in you, and that your joy might be 
full.”—John xv, II. 


Wuy do we think of God so seldom as the 
author of joy? We are ready enough to arraign 
Him as the author of our griefs and the source of 
our miseries. By phrases like “the dispensations 
of His providence” we always mean something dis- 
agreeable, painful, and distressing. When we talk 
of His sovereignty, the shadow of Him fills the sky 
with dread; when we talk of His commandments, 
they seem to lift themselves like mountain peaks 
that human feet can not scale; the marvels of His 
administration excite in us no enthusiasm; we shud- 
der at the knowledge of His power, the sweep of His 
authority, the infinitely various displays of His in- 
telligence and energy. But we do not praise Him 
as the source of our delights. May it not be pos- 
sible that this conception of God is wholly wrong, 
and in itself the cause of gloom? Is there not in the 

III 


112 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


text a suggestion, at any rate, that the Divine pur- 
pose includes not merely our perfection in righteous- 
ness, but our perfection in joy? Does not the In- 
finite Father plan for the gladness as well as the 
holiness of His children? Is it not a kind of blas- 
phemy to think of Him as satisfied with somber- 
visaged servants, prompt to answer every demand 
of a sensitive conscience, firm even to fierceness in 
the performance of difficult duty, ready to pluck out 
the right eye or to cut off the right hand to do His 
will; but with no songs on their lips, no smiles on 
their faces, no merriment in their hearts, no moments 
of rapturous gladness in their lives? Once we raise 
this question fairly, the sayings of Jesus about bles- 
sedness and joy come trooping to our minds, insist- 
ing on their proper place in our ideals of life. We 
see that He is a teacher and a bringer of gladness; 
that when He took upon Him our weakness and our 
sorrows He took upon Him an alien experience; 
that the heart of Christ is joy, deep, abiding, satis- 
fying joy. His precepts, His examples, His daily 
companionships, His final sacrifice, His power over 
life and death—all had for their ultimate purpose 
the development in His disciples of a consummate 
bliss, a Divinely-sweet contentment, the glory of a 
great and indestructible gladness. 


THE Joy oF JESUS. 113 


“Deus vult,’ God wills it! cried the Crusader as 
he rushed to battle under the impulse of wild en- 
thusiasm. He was all wrong in thus mistaking the 
fire of barbarous feeling, the ecstasy of savage ex- 
citement for a wave of Divine command. And so 
in every epoch and in every corner of the planet men 
have raised their cry of “Deus vult,’ God wills it, 
over this and the other enterprise, over this and the 
other requirement born of their own folly, their own 
misconception, their own ignorance, their own ex- 
citement. 

But the real Deus vult, the real will of God, is 
that we should move forward steadily to the discov- 
ery of knowledge and the attainment of holiness, 
and, above all, to the possession of abiding joy. 

Having grasped this thought of God in Jesus 
Christ, note in the next place that the joy of Christ 
is not merely negative. It does not consist wholly 
in the absence of pain, or hindrance, or sorrow. Joy 
is not incompatible with grief. The short ministry 
of Jesus is startling with incidents of agony. The 
Wilderness, Gethsemane, and Calvary mark for us 
the highest reach of human suffering. For in all of 
them we see that combination of physical wretched- 
ness and mental torture which taxes human endur- 


ance to the utmost. But “for the joy that was set 
8 


114 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


before Him” this Man of Sorrows “endured the 
Cross, despising the shame.” That is to say, joy 
and misery were concurrent possibilities and concur- 
rent realities in the life of Jesus Christ. Trans- 
figuration and Crucifixion belong to the same won- © 
derful career; the garden of the sepulcher was alsc 
the garden of the resurrection, and over against the 
weakness of Peter and the treachery of Judas stood 
the strengthening angels of the Living God. And 
well for us that it was so! For the tendency of 
modern thought, both in our science and our liter- 
ature, is to make happiness nothing but a sense of 
well-being dependent upon certain physical condi. 
tions. Burns’s “Jolly Beggars” or his “Tam 
O’Shanter,” 


“ Glorious 
O’er all the ills of life victorious,” 


give us vivid, fleeting, enticing, but delusive pictures 
of this well-being. And the ideally perfect human 
animal, of whom the philosophy of the future never 
tires of prating, is to be its permanent incarnation. 
Now I suspect that this ideally perfect animal of the 
future is only an inverted myth. Yet I do not de- 
spise him as a useful expectation, for it is folly to 
scoff at any kind of perfection, and only a dunce in 


THE Joy oF JESUS. 115 


our day neglects the blood of his heart or the cells 
of his brain. 

But hitherto the magnificent human animal has 
not always had a good time in the world. Goethe 
was a magnificent human animal, and so was Daniel 
Webster ; the one as splendidly formed as any crea- 
ture in Europe, the other the astonishment of all who 
saw him. The German poet has given us his ex- 
periences in many shapes, conspicuously in Faust. 
And what has this excellent human animal to say? 
Just what another splendid creature whined out to 
the world many centuries ago: “Vanity of vanities, 
all is Vanity and Vexation of Spirit.” 

And the American statesman with a bottle of 
Madeira under his yellow waistcoat, but looking like 
Jupiter, may be a pretty sight for an essay-writer ; 
but he is a gloomy portent for that era of magnificent 
animals when men shall be born to happiness as the 
sparks are to fly upwards. Shall we then give up 
the quest for happiness, and crawl disappointed to 
our graves? Or shall we look for other sources of 
joy than are to be found in blood and muscle? 

To us who must face to-morrow and its tasks 
with shattered nerves and enfeebled organs your 
gospel of the magnificent animal is, I confess, an 
inefficient medicine and a worthless stimulant. It 


116 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


fails us when we are weary; it mocks us when we 
are sick; it taunts us at the bedside of our beloved ; 
and stares at us pitilessly from the eyes of our dead 
when we close them in helpless mercy to ourselves. 

I come back, therefore, to my proposition: what 
we need is a joy concurrent with our trouble, our 
weariness, our care, our sorrow. And such was the 
joy of Jesus Christ. And the elements of it are not 
difficult to discover and to state. 

I, THERE Is THE Joy oF Manirest Destiny; 
and 

II. Tore Joy oF ADEQUATE STRENGTH. 

I. Even Marcus Aurelius saw that life without a 
definite purpose must prove a misery. But I mean 
something sublimer than having a purpose in life. 
Not that having a distinct purpose is to be decried 
or underrated. Liszt told his parents that he would 
make them rich by his music, and he did far more. 
Correggio’s exclamation, “I, too, am a painter,” 
started him on a great career; so did Paganini’s 
determination to exhaust the possibilities of the vio- 
lin, and Cavouz’s resolve to be Prime Minister of a 
united Italy. These purposes, however, were in ac- 
cord with the temperament and desires of those who 
had them. But a destiny may conflict with one’s 
disposition and cherished hopes; it may be repugnant 


THE Joy oF Jesus. 117 


to one’s nature; it may be, and is often, a demand 
for renunciation and sacrifice and hardship, and for 
the endurance of bodily and mental suffering. 

The task and environment of Jesus were alien 
to His nature; but He accepted both as the appoint- 
ment of Infinite Wisdom, as the requirement of In- 
fmite Love. He set about the thing He did, not 
because He liked to do it, but because there was no 
other way of fulfilling His Father’s will. The cry 
of Gethsemane is the concentration of many a prayer, 
“Let this cup pass from Me, neverthless not My will 
but Thine be done.” Contrast now the scene in 
Gethsemane with the Transfiguration, and you will 
understand what-I mean by the joy of manifest des- 
tiny. For in that moment of splendor “the decease 
that He was to accomplish at Jerusalem” looms up 
distinct and clear. But in spite of it, the mountain- 
top glows with the glory of the future, and the val- 
leys echo with the voice of the Father proclaiming, 
“This is My beloved Son in whom I am well 
pleased.” It was the moment in which the God 
within Him and the God without Him met in rap- 
turous accord. This is the meaning of that magnifi- 
cent picture in the Letter to the Hebrews, in which 
Jesus takes up the language of the Psalmist, “Lo, 
I come, I come to do Thy will, O God!” And the 


118 Ture ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


meaning of the still more beautiful picture of Him: 
“Who for the joy that was set before Him endured 
the Cross, despising the shame, and hath sat down 
at the right hand of the throne of God.” 

It may be that such a moment of transfiguration 
was possible to Him alone; or possible at most to the 
heroic spirits whose appointed destinies involve great 
burdens, and therefore require these great compen- 
sations. But I am fain to believe that’there are such 
moments of great joy for all of us who are walking 
humbly with our God. Few of us, perhaps, may 
see as Jesus saw so clearly the outcome, the tri- 
umphant outcome of effort and obedience; but for 
all of us I am persuaded God has moments when 
we may catch glimpses of the value of our work and 
of its relation to some higher scheme of things; mo- 
ments when our work-a-day garments shine with a 
brightness whiter than any fuller can give them; 
moments when God Himself tells us that we are in 
the right way, that we are parts of a great plan and 
instruments of a great progress, that we shall triumph 
certainly over drudgery and difficulty and disap- 
pointment, that we shall accomplish finally, not in- 
deed what we have wished, but what the All-wise 
Father has willed. And such moments are replete 


with joy. 


THE Joy oF JESUS. 119 


Nay, I go further. God gives to many a one 
glimpses of larger life and diviner achievement ; and 
these to whom He offers them fail of happiness be- 
cause they are disobedient to the heavenly vision. 
We hear of those who, like Moses and Paul, yield 
to the Divine enchantment; but we seldom hear of 
those like Balaam who see and then resist. How 
many there be that start out in life with larger ideals 
and unusual powers, doing at first the things they 
wish to do, their wishes carrying them easily and 
rapidly towards fine achievement, but who succumb 
to glittering temptations or flinch at obstacles, and 
refuse to make great sacrifice! Read, for instance, 
Ticknor’s description of young Daniel Webster at 
the delivery of the Plymouth oration. One feels in 
reading it that God was offering to this wonderful 
child of the granite hills a possible destiny that any 
of His angels might have envied. But in moments 
of temptation Webster forgot, and in other moments 
disobeyed the heavenly vision. He could not con- 
quer himself. He could not cling to the ideals of 
the Salisbury farmhouse, the ideals of his Puritan 

ancestors, so that great as were the achievements 
of orator and statesman, we are compelled to know 
him as a disappointed man. He descended from the 
mount of transfiguration, where Ticknor beheld him 


120 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME, 


with adoring wonder ‘not to work the miracles of a 
giant statesman serving his country by serving God, 
but rather to become the disfigured angel of our 
national history, somber, morose, rejected, the 
shadow of a vast splendor, but the shadow also of a 
mightier possibility which, if realized, would have 
filled him with divine joy. 

Or look at Thomas Carlyle. He had his visions, 
too; some of them most glorious. He ought to have 
been a happy man. But, then, he must have con- 
quered by God’s grace his temper and his circum- 
stances. Few men have worked so bravely; few 
men, though, have ever murmured so continually. 
Every day he went grumbling to a task that he 
loathed. I surely would not blame him for wishing 
to spend his strength in deeds rather than in words, 
in projects of tangible kindness and visible mercy, 
for I have often the same feeling of the impotence 
of speeches and sermons and books. But Carlyle’s 
creed, small as it was, required him to accept his 
destiny with joy; to use the beautiful words of St. 
Paul, to finish his course with joy. He was ap- 
pointed, he believed, to rally his fellow-men to their 
daily labors as to tasks allotted by Divine decree; 
to call them away from wasted effort and vain re- 
pining to fruitful and beneficent activity. How 


THE Joy oF JESUS. 121 


could he succeed unless he accepted his own lot 
with cheerful expectation? Because activities such 
as he craved were denied him, why must he go 
about the thing that he was compelled to do (and 
which he did grandly) with groans and melancholy? 
Why could not he also finish his splendid course 
with joy? Because, so at least it seems to me, he 
never learned of Jesus, who was meek and lowly 
of heart, and he never accepted his destiny with 
faith and hope. Compare the stalwart Scotchman 
with the sufferer from Tarsus; both were men of 
great vitality, and both had thorns in the flesh and 
thorns in the spirit. Paul had his aches and his ail- 
ments, his bruises and his dismal turns; he, too, was 
buffeted by man and by Satan, by contradiction and 
perversity and folly and every form of human ugli- 
ness and hindrance. Yet what a blast of triumph 
he trumpets in the face of his tormentor! “Most 
gladly, therefore, will I gather glory in my infirm- 
ities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” 
Over Carlyle this tortured little preacher of the first 
century had only one advantage. It was this: For 
Paul the compulsion of circumstances was the will 
of God; in them was manifest his destiny; and in 
the power of his great Commander he might organ- 
ize victory from the shreds of his strength. He 


122 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


might have moped and murmured; he might have 
sulked and surrendered; but he had learned wisdom 
in the school of Christ. He had entered into the 
heart of that amazing life; rather the heart of that 
amazing life had entered into him. Not easily; not 
all at once; but finally he climbed the steeps and saw 
the splendor. God was for him; who could be 
against him? Every blotch upon his face, every 
quiver of his trembling eyelids had significance and 
power ; so, too, had every incident of his career. 
For his comrades in the school of Gamaliel his 
life might seem a willful ruin; for his contemporaries 
like Festus and Agrippa he was at best an inspired 
lunatic ; nor was his life even what he had pictured 
it to himself when all alone with Christ in the moun- 
tains of Arabia, for it looked at times both incoherent 
and inconsequential, a group of stirring incidents 
and scattered friendships, a tangled skein of triumph 
and disaster. Yet in the times that tried his soul 
his eyes grew large and luminous with joy; past 
and future blended into perfect harmony; over his 
head, as over that of Jesus, broke the voice of the 
Father, “This is My beloved Son in whom I am 
well pleased.”” “Bear,” says the stoic philosopher, 
“bear the unavoidable with dignity.” No! says 
Jesus Christ, bear it with a calm, invincible delight ; 


THE Joy oF JESUS. 123 


for if it is unavoidable it is the will of God. This 
compulsion of circumstances is the hand of infinite 
love and infinite intelligence; He lays His hand 
upon you, and besets you behind and before. If 
He lets you go on your way, rejoice! If He makes 
you go His way, rejoice also, even though your 
naked feet are cut with stones, even though your 
aching limbs grow faint and feeble. “For thy way 
is not hid from the Lord, and thy judgment is not 
passed over of thy God.” “The vision is for an ap- 
pointed time; if it tarry wait for it; it will surely 
come.” Some one objects, though: “This may be 
true enough for those like St. Paul, who have great 
tasks allotted them in the economy of God. My 
place in creation is too small. You can not soothe 
me, much less thrill me, with your big word, Des- 
tiny. The joy you make so much of, has for me 
no value and no meaning.” Now, this is hardly true. 
No words are more abused than great and small. 
There is profound wisdom in Paul’s declaration that 
“the weak things of this world are chosen to confound 
the mighty and the things that are not to bring to 
naught the things that are.” He was himself an 
instance of it. The Acta Diurna, the daily journal 
of the Roman Empire, never mentioned him. He 
was too small for notice. But within him dwelt the 


124 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


consciousness of power and over him flashed the 
gleams of a splendid foreboding. Like him we can 
never go wrong in thinking nobly of the task ap- 
pointed us; the issues of our labors are with God, 
and He alone knows the relation of them to His vast 
administration. 


“Thousands at His bidding speed 

And post o’er land and ocean without rest; 

They also serve who only stand and wait.” 
Whether one is bidden to speed or to stand, the 
one sure thing is this: the life that is hid with Christ 
in God can not be an aimless one. The eternal 
energy sustains, the eternal wisdom vindicates it. 
This explains, I think, the gladness of the early 
Christians. Paul’s rapturous cry, “Rejoice, again 


ihe 


I say, Rejoice!” found eager response among those 
who felt themselves laborers together with God. 
The world they knew to be passing away with the 
lust thereof. But they were doing the will of God, 
and were destined to abide forever! 
II. This brings us to the second proposition 
about the joy of Jesus: There was in Jesus Christ 
the consciousness of a power adequate to every emer- 
gency of life. And such a consciousness once estab- 
lished in the soul is a source of indescribable satis- 


faction. The young and the healthy have a natural 


THE Joy oF Jesus. 125 


conciousness of power; they in their ignorance of 
life laugh with exultation and eager certainty. O 
they are going to conquer for themselves a merry 
life! Where are the dragons too strong for them 
to subdue? “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, 
and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, 
and walk in the ways of thine heart and in the sight 
of thine eyes; but know thou that for all these things 
God will bring thee into judgment.” For how brief 
is our youth! How swift to come are the days of 
sorrow! How urgent the demands upon our 
strength, if we must work! How exasperating the 
drain upon our health, if we are doomed to play! 
“A mad world, my masters,’ commented Shakes- 
peare, and he knew every phase of it. Mad in the 
aimless rush of its activities, mad in its gloomy and 
clumsy devices for amusement, mad in its hypoc- 
risies of wisdom, maddest of all in its conflicts of 
desire. And we are not slow to discover its madness 
and our weakness; its tremendous drafts upon our 
energies and the scantiness of our supply. We 
measure ourselves against the tasks of to-day and 
the demands of to-morrow, only to shrink at the 
result. We run with the footmen and they weary 
us, and we wonder how we shall contend with the 
horsemen. And the swellings of Jordan rumble 


126 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


in our ears long before the clouds have filled them- 
selves with rain! Foresight is beclouded with fore- 
boding; the future darkened with anxiety and fear. 
Nevertheless Jesus confronted this mad and tire- 
some world with a quiet sanity that even at this 
distance fills us with unutterable calm. Behold Him 
as He stands among His enemies with His watch- 
word, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” 
This is no divine darling, no child of eternal leisure, 
no celestial idler playing among the sons of men. 
This is the Son of God the Mighty, and of Jehovah 
the Eternal. He has accepted the compulsion of cir- 
cumstances as the will of God; but He is claiming 
with it His eternal birthright, power enough to do 
His work and to finish His sublime enterprise. 
Goethe once discovered in his grandson’s album 
some sentimental nonsense of Jean Paul. “We 
have,” so ran the melancholy sentence, “we have 
only three instants; one in which we are born, one 
in which we live, and half a second in which to die.” 
“Let the boy bethink him,” wrote the wise old man, 
“let the boy bethink him that every hour has its 
sixty minutes and every day its twenty-four hours; 
and let him cheer himself reflecting how much he 
can accomplish every single day.” Here was a les- 
son learned from the Sermon on the Mount and 


THE Joy oF Jesus. 127 


from the life of Jesus Christ. For we never see 
Jesus weighing Himself against His task and find- 
ing either His strength or His time too short! 
Surely there must be an unutterable joy in the con- 
sciousness that one is adequate to all the necessities 
of one’s career. Mark you, I do not say adequate 
to all that one may wish to do or all that others may 
wish to have one do. Jesus had no fire with which 
to burn Samaritan villages, because the Sons of 
Thunder were in wrath; He had no strength to 
found a kingdom such as even Jewish patriots 
craved ; but He discovered strength with a great joy 
whenever blind eyes besought Him for His healing 
touch, and when the home at Bethany was darkened 
with that sorrow of death that none of us escape. 

Whether you and I will live to carry out our 
plans, whether we shall get the things achieved, on 
which we set our hearts—who in all the world can 
tell? Even the grandeur of our purposes, were they 
tenfold more magnificent than they are, would 
hardly guarantee us their fulfillment. But of one 
thing we children of God may rest assured. So long 
as we and our plans are necessary to that sublime 
event towards which the whole creation moves, so 
long we shall renew our strength. Or to put it much 
more simply, the thing that is really necessary for 


128 Tue ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


our beloved, the thing that is really necessary for 
those we fain would help and God would prosper, 
that thing you and I are going to get finished; for 
that thing our powers will prove fully equal; even 
our weakness will help us to get that done. O! if 
you have never known a crisis in which the hidden 
fountains of your being burst into sudden energy, 
when in the urgency of a great duty or in the joy of 
a great purpose you felt yourself allied to all the 
majesty of God, why then I can not make you under- 
stand these words of Jesus Christ! For it is only in 
such moments that death becomes a shadow and 
life alone seems real. It is only in such moments 
that “the power of an endless life” ceases to be a 
phrase and becomes a glorious fact. Then it is that 
the soul is filled with calm defiance of all possible 
disaster; then it is that the conscience grows om- 
nipotent; then it is that God becomes alive and 
nearer than the sky; then it is that all things are for 
our: sakes; the flowers at our feet and the stellar 
clusters of the firmament, the birds that sing in the 
sunshine, and the worlds that roll in light, the breath 
of zephyr and the blast of storm-wind, the march 
of nations and the majesty of everlasting law, all 
our servants and all our treasures, for then indeed 
are we become the sons of God! 


VIII. 
THE JOY OF JESUS. 


“These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy 
might remain in you, and that your joy might 
be full.”—John xv, II. 


Joy, I said to you last Sunday, was the birth- 
right of Jesus; not incompatible with sorrow and 
grief, but stronger in Him than either of them. I 
pointed out to you then two elements of this endur- 
ing and triumphant joy; first His consciousness of 
ultimate destiny; and, secondly, His consciousness 
of a strength adequate to any emergency of His 
career. I come now to other elements equally obvi- 
ous and equally important; viz., the joy of an un- 
stained memory, the joy of anticipated beneficence, 
and the joy of ownership. 

I. Which of you, said Jesus when the contention 
between Him and the Pharisees made them thirsty 
for His life, which of you convicteth Me of sin? 
A question like this on the lips of some men might 
indicate more pride than peace; a defiant challenge 

9 129 


130 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME, 


rather than a happy conscience; an overbearing 
haughtiness, rather than a mind full of blissful rec- 
collections and of gladsome plans. But the purity of 
Jesus was blended with a touching humility. He 
fought a desperate battle in the Wilderness to main- 
tain it; yet He never flaunted it and never bragged 
about it. Every word and every act of His life 
flowed forth from. the unstained, unsullied foun- 
tains of conscious integrity and conscious rectitude ; 
but how free from arrogance He was! How tender 
towards the erring! How forbearing with every 
form of weakness save hypocrisy alone! 

Now this joy of a pure conscience is perhaps in- 
tenser, because diviner, than any other known to us. 
And it is re-enforced continually by every increase 
of our knowledge and our power. The youth who 
conquers his first great temptation hardly knows the 
meaning of his victory; the sense of delight that 
comes to him fortifies his soul, but it is only a har- 
binger of future delights and future revelations. 
As time goes by the relation of that early triumph 
to his after conduct becomes distinct and plain, and 
the relation of it to all subsequent events fills him 
with sweet surprise and invigorating wonder. On 
the other hand, | 


“Tis conscience doth make cowards of us all.” 


THE Joy oF JESUS. 131 


And what a kill-joy is this wretched cowardice! 
But what if there be no evil deeds to remember? 
What if the stream of recollection flow on in the 
mind innocent and untainted? ‘Then surely we do 
not hide away our own memories, nor shrink from 
the shadows of our own experience. 

Of the childhood of Jesus the record is indeed 
scant; the story of His visit to Jerusalem and the 
Temple, of His obedience at Nazareth, and of His 
favor with God and man! Brief, indeed; but very 
beautiful! This swift and powerful hold on His 
Father’s business, this cheerful subjection, to the 
narrowness of His Nazarene home, this radiance 
of affection shed upon all with whom He talked, 
must have made Him the loveliest figure of the 
Galilean town. What He remembered of His youth 
in later years we can conjecture only; but what He 
did not remember we can tell quite easily. He re- 
membered no bitter words of disobedience or strife, 
no outbreaks of jealousy or hate, no treacheries or 
stratagems, no ruin wrought in others by sudden 
impulse or by cold deceit, no surrender to Satan, no 
betrayal of God. Tempted on all points like as we 
are, yet without sin. How overwhelming is the 
meaning of such perfect triumph! For the stream 
of recollection scorches too often like fire or bites 


132 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


into our strength hike furious acid. What a picture 
is that of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep and 
rubbing her little hand! She who was strong 
enough to control her thoughts in her waking mo- 
ments is in her dreams the tortured and helpless 
victim of the dreadful spot that will not wash away. 

Does some one among you look at me furtively 
as if to say, “Why smite me thus, me in my mis- 
ery, when you promised me to speak of joy?” I 
make a twofold answer. First, my words are partly 
for the young and innocent; for the boy whose soul 
is yet untainted, for the girl whose mind is yet un- 
stained. To them I make my appeal. My son, my 
daughter, do not fill your memories with evil 
thoughts and bitter recollections! It is easy to com- 
mit sin; it is hard to forget it, and impossible to 
destroy its consequences. They hide themselves in 
the depths of your being, to break in upon you after 
many years; they bury themselves in your surround- 
ings, and rise again to smite you with a terrible sur- 
prise. Once your brain is poisoned with the recol- 
lection of wrongdoing, all your thoughts will show 
the fatal tinge. Your enterprises may prosper, your 
latent powers lift you to pinnacles that you did not 
dare to covet and to possibilities that to some purer 
being might be almost divine. But just at the mo- 


THE Joy oF JESUS. 133 


ment that you are girding yourself to some supreme 
exertion, Satan will trip you with the shadow of 
your sinful past, and beat you back and beat you 
down to baser things. 

II. But then I say to you, my fellow culprit, 
for you and for me this only now remains—so to 
fill our minds with thoughts of life as to crowd away 
these specters of the past. The innocence of our 
childhood is gone forever. We may no longer climb 
the hills with boyish glee, or count the stars that 
struggle through the twilight with eyes unspotted 
by the sense of guilt. The distance from the tree- 
tops to the sky has lengthened for us, and the angels 
are no longer playing with us hide-and-seek either 
in the forest or in the firmament. And in their 
places other forms appear, instances of our own lives 
caught by the photographic power of conscience 
and kept alive to haunt us. What shall we do? 
What can we do? We must rejoice in vivid pur- 
poses of mercy, in vivid plans of lovingkindness, 
in clearly outlined enterprises into which we may 
pour the remnant of our energies. And so when 
Satan comes to trip us with the memories of the 
past we can beat him back and beat him down with 
the realities of the present and the purposes of the 
future. The art of forgetting, the extinction and 


134 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


destruction of evil ideas and tormenting recollec- 
tions consists in crowding down and crowding out 
the evil with the good; in crowding out the corrosive 
recollection with the noble purpose, in chasing away 
the shadow of sinful realities with noble dreams that 
we are daily turning into realities. “He went about 
doing good!” How sweet that sounds, and yet how 
simple! But be not led astray. Jesus was not a 
sublime vagrant, sauntering through Galilee on 
chance excursions of benevolence. His was a de- 
liberate life ; each day crowded to the edge with pur- 
poses to be fulfilled. His disciples were to be 
trained ; the lost were to be sought and to be saved; 
Samaritan and Gentile were to be reached ; the foun- 
dations of the kingdom of God were to be laid. 
He, like the most of us, had one chief absorbing 
task ; into that He poured the energy of His perfect 
mind as well as the energy of His indomitable will. 
But around that central task clustered many oppor- 
tunities for kindness, always embraced eagerly be- 
cause always anticipated so gladly. If then we may 
not rejoice like Him in an unblemished past, in un- 
sullied and untainted recollections, we may at any 
rate resemble Him in this, that we too rejoice in 
prospective ministries of mercy, in the cup of cold 
water that we shall give in the name of the dis- 


Po fih 


THE Joy oF JESUS. 135 


ciple, in the daily forecast of generous deeds that 
we mean to do before the sun goes down. 

Thus, and thus only, can the succession of our 
thoughts become a stream of gladness. We must 
lose ourselves to save ourselves; not forgetting at 
all the central task assigned to us as our ultimate 
destiny, but combining with it even in our busiest 
moments and our severest thinking a prompt and 
generous and ubiquitous helpfulness. Then, I re- 
peat, the stream of our thoughts will be a stream 
of gladness; within us a fountain of sweet antici- 
pation, and without us an ever-ripening fruitage of 
sweet realities. 

III. But another kind of joy quite manifest in 
Jesus, was the joy of ownership. This may indeed 
sound strange when we recall His famous saying, 
“The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have 
nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay 
His head.” Or when we recall the statement of 
St. Paul, “Though He was rich, for our sakes He 
became poor, that we through His poverty might 
be made rich.” It is, however, the same paradox 
which Paul himself delighted in. As sorrowful, yet 
rejoicing ; as poor, yet making many rich; as having 
nothing, yet possessing all things. The jurist when 
he comes to define ownership, defines it in his miser- 


136 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


able, negative way; the power to exclude others 
from the enjoyment of the thing possessed. But a 
Divine reason sees clearly enough that only what 
we enjoy do we possess, and what we do not enjoy 
we do not and can not possess in any but the pitiful 
legal sense. Of some men and women it were far 
truer to say that they are owned by their lands and 
their shops, by their houses and their horses, by their 
pictures and their porcelain, by their books and 
their bonds, than to speak of them as owning any- 
thing whatever. 

Jesus, however, moves before us, absolutely 
owner of His world. The lilies of the field, the birds 
of the air, the mountain slopes of Galilee, the spar- 
rows that fall to the ground, the waving harvests 
ready for the sickle, the ripening clusters in the 
vineyards, the falling rain, the wind that bloweth 
where it listeth, the clouds that redden the evening 
sky, the living waters gushing from the rocks, the 
shadows that chase each other across the placid 
lake, the sunshine bathing Olivet in splendor,—these 
all belonged to Him, all wrought together for His 
happiness as they wrought for no one else in all 
the world. He was in a mansion of His Father’s 
house, and every nook and cranny of it gave Him 
pleasure. 


THE Joy oF Jesus. 137 


Schiller, the German poet, wrote a famous poem 
called “The Gods of Greece,” deploring the empti- 
ness of Nature as we know it. Science, he la- 
mented, has reduced the sun to a fiery ball which 
men can weigh and measure; science has scared 
the nymph from the fountains and the dryads from 
the forests; the billows now are breaking into life- 
less foam and the stars are smothered into everlast- 
ing silence. But who ever thinks of an empty sky 
when he walks and talks with Jesus? How sub- 
limely silent He is about the utilities of Nature; 
how sublimely inspiring and instructive when He 
deals with Nature as the symbol of His Father’s 
mind and heart! His enjoyment is something richer 
than the delight in color and in form; in symmetry 
of structure and variety of hue; in the surprises of 
sunlight and the stir of creature life; in the gurgling 
of waters or the murmur of the breeze. He is in 
His Father’s house. These things belong to Him. 
These things were meant for Him. Wide as may 
be the sweep of their influence, many and various 
as may be their utilities, they are there also for His 
sake, to be the ministers of His peace and joy. 

Now if Nature has for us no such joyful min- 
istry, the reason does not lie in the central task that 
our ultimate destiny requires of us. What is any 


138 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


task of ours compared with His? What is any 

struggle of ours or any sorrow of ours compared 

with His temptation and His agony? 
Wordsworth’s sonnet tells us where the reason 


lies: 
“The world is too much with us; late and soon, 
Spending and getting we lay waste our powers.” 


We do not take time to look about us and see what 
we possess. And thus we gain the world and lose 
the joy of life. 

But not only did He thus own Nature; Jesus 
was the owner of every home He entered and every 
synagogue in which He prayed, of the Temple at 
Jerusalem and all the oracles of God. For of these 
He knew the uses, and these He made subservient 
to His will. We enter now and then a home which 
seems to belong to us at once, so gracious is the 
welcome, so unrestrained and charming is the hos- 
pitality. An atmosphere of freedom fills our lungs 
and stirs our blood; our thoughts leap swiftly to 
the surface; we lose all fear of awkwardness; and a 
resurrection of our nobler self surprises us with 
unexpected power. But now and then our own 
homes are entered by a guest who creates them for 
us all anew, so radiant is the soul he brings, so rich 
is he in all the arts of joy. The pictures have a 


THE Joy oF JESUS. 139 


new meaning, the books a new charm; he breathes 
into every household word the magic of his being, 
and makes everything about him an instrument of 
pleasure; and when he vanishes we know for the 
time that while he was with us our home belonged 
to him in a sense that it never had belonged to our- 
selves. ; 

Just such a guest was Jesus as I conceive Him 
among His friends at Capernaum, or in the precious 
home at Bethany. See Martha standing yonder, 
her cheeks all flushed with eager service, glad to 
show her love as best she can. See her kindly smile, 
and listen to her mock reproach, “Lord, bid my 
sister come and help me!” “Nay, Martha, nay! 
why all this fuss and industry for Me! Come thou 
rather to thy sister here, and let us talk together 
of the kingdom. This surely is the better part.” 

Now, few of us may carry with us such a grace 
and such a joy. But surely we can enter the homes 
that are open to us in something of His spirit. Is 
not my neighbor’s garden mine when the glory of 
the flowers greets and gladdens my weary brain? 
Are not his trees mine when the foliage of them 
fringed with raindrops glistens with imprisoned 
rainbows in the returning sunshine? 

When I was a boy we were very poor, and proud 


140 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME. 


as we were poor. But I had one great possession 
in which I exulted almost fiercely. It was the foun- 
tain in Franklin Square. To this day, when in 
Philadelphia, my heart leaps up at sight of the spot 
where I used to stand and watch the watery columns 
break high up in the air. For that I used to feel 
was mine! Foolish child! the sky above my head 
and all the stars were mine; so too was all the 
wisdom of the ages, if I only roused myself to seek 
it; and many homes were there to welcome me, if 
I were only worthy of the welcome; gracious women 
to cheer me on, and strong men ready to call me 
friend. How rich I was, poor, little fool; only I did 
not know it, and that made me poor indeed! But 
Jesus knew and understood how rich He was, and 
therefore His exceeding joy. 

Add to these sources of His joy another kind of 
ownership, the full possession of Himself. Many 
men are slaves of their own genius: witness Julius 
Cesar, or Charles XII of Sweden, or the poet 
Burns. But Jesus owned Himself; wielded surely 
every power of mind and body, making all obedient 
to His destiny. He is choosing serenely even when 
He seems to be compelled, and He gives Himself 
away because He owns Himself so absolutely. 
There is, I know, a rapture in the sweep of sudden 


THE Joy oF Jesus. 141 


passion, in the rush and tumult of ungoverned im- 
pulse; but there is degradation also. The bliss of 
Jesus is altogether different. He goes about pro- 
claiming, “It is more blessed to give than to re- 
ceive,” and He suffers any beggar on the highway 
to challenge Him make good His word. He gave 
His strength quite consciously and gladly; without 
grudging or wincing at necessary pain or flinching 
from ingratitude or misconception. Not Herod with 
his cunning or Pilate with his legions could force 
Him to display His power or utter an unwilling 
word, and the clamors of the mob break powerless 
against this majesty of self-possession. 

And here again I think we fail. We never quite 
possess ourselves. We shrink from criticism or 
from crucifixion, and dare not do the thing we 
ought. Some splendid vision stands before us beck- 
oning us to sacrifice and grand endeavor. The will 
of God within us urges us to find and exercise our 
highest powers; to rise beyond the sordid expecta- 
tions of the meaner minds about us, and to realize 
the thought and plans of God. But we falter and 
fall back. Seeking to save our lives we lose them, 
and miss our highest destiny and richest joy. For 
us the hour never comes, the hour in which we lift 
our eyes to heaven as Jesus did, and say, “I have 


142 THE ANGEL IN THE FLAME, 


glorified Thee on the earth, I have finished the work 
Thou gavest me to do,” the hour in which we 
gather our beloved ones about us and say, “O right- 
eous Father, I have known these, and these have 
known that Thou hast sent me.” For it is only into 
such a soul, so self-possessed and yet so self-sup- 
pressed, that God makes entrance with His glory. 
Judas might betray Him, Peter might deny Him, 
John might falter and fall back, and all the rest take 
flight; nay, His physical strength might break be- 
neath the awful pressure, and the misery of pain 
and weakness come to make His task appear impos- 
sible; yet listen to Him as He rises from the arms 
of God to face His bitter trial ; see Him as He stands 
before the Council in the grandeur of His integrity ; 
watch Him as His loving eyes fix themselves on 
Peter’s face; behold Him in majestic silence before 
the eager Herod ready to release Him for a miracle; 
study Him in His interview with Pilate! He is 
everywhere serenely conscious of His destiny and 
dignity ; He is always sure of Himself and sure of 
God. 

He saved others, but Himself He can not save! 
Such was the mocking cry of His revilers. How 
pitiful their misconception! He alone of all men 
saved Himself. He alone carried back His soul un- 


THE Joy oF JEsus. 143 


tainted and unshattered to the Father whence He 
came. He alone of all men lifted up the standard 
that has ever since inspired them that work for 
righteousness, nourished them that believe in hu- 
man possibilities and human progress. “I have fin- 
ished the work that Thou gavest Me to do.” 

O Father, glorify us also, that we too may 
glorify Thee! Help us to keep our souls unspotted ; 
make us at home in the world where Thou hast 
placed us, and at home with each other, adding daily 
to each other’s happiness. Give us possession of 
ourselves, that we may do Thy will and finish with 
joy the work Thou hast given us to do. Do not 
desert us in our griefs or abandon us in our weak- 
ness, but sustain us with Thy presence and rejoice 
us with the increase of our strength, we ask for 
Jesus’ sake. Amen. 


Date Due 


6 
c 
3S 
oO 
a 
a 
s 
£ 
a 
o 
ey 
a 
= 
= 
fa 
um 
‘ 
eo 


1137 


r 
= 
_ 
" 
i 


MAY 


APR 2 


Li 


